


Where the Water Meets the Sky

by speaks



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Childhood Friends AU, M/M, a story for ocean lovers like me, and is mostly based on real places in a real ocean town, if you like childhood friends stories and also mermaid stories boi do I have a surprise for u lol, mer!Keith, mermaid au, not applicable until later but trigger warning for depression (without spoiling too much), they start out as 10 yr olds in ch1 but the story spans a whole decade! just fyi, this fic rides the line between fluff and angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2019-10-15 22:24:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 89,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17537450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speaks/pseuds/speaks
Summary: Lance is exactly what you'd expect of a kid who loves the ocean and lucked out by growing up within walking distance of it. From the time he was old enough to differentiate shades of blue, he's been obsessed with the sea. So his life plan is simple. Three steps: grow up, become a marine biologist, save the ocean.Except...  it might not be that simple at all. There might be a little bit of a detour between steps one and three, by way of a bright red somebody who scares him clean off his surfboard one day.. . .In which Lance wants to save the ocean, and ends up saving a Keith instead.





	1. The Grotto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, Santa Cruz, California. I have a very special relationship with this city that I won't go into, but please know that it is my single favorite place in the whole world. That's where this story takes place, and most of the little places in this story will be real as well! So I'll be including pics as we go for these places' real-life counterparts, if that's the type of thing that interests you. 
> 
> Visual Reference Links - click for pretty pictures of Santa Cruz! :)
> 
> [Lance's neighborhood](https://www.google.com/maps/@36.9516894,-122.0427042,3a,75y,146.57h,81.11t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snISEMjpg5N9hAAsicskMCQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)  
> AKA a random point along Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz which, if dropped into street view mode of google maps, will give you a perfect image of the kind of neighborhood where I envisioned Lance’s house to be.  
> [The Boardwalk during the day](https://carousel-beach-inn.com/images/slides/slide-beach-boardwalk-wq-018.jpg)  
> [The Boardwalk at night](https://www.santacruz.org/portals/0/boardwalkBG1.jpg)  
> [The Wharf during the day](http://media.bizj.us/view/img/10338592/wharf-aerial-view-4feb2013.jpg)  
> [The Wharf at night](https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/santa-cruz-wharf-glowing-at-dusk-picture-id475968719)

Leandro Socorro Lacoste-McClain was in love with the ocean. And, as it happened, he grew up on a cliffside overlooking the sea.

The real estate was worth millions but his middle-class family lucked out; his great-grandparents left it in their will when Lance was four, and thus they moved from one ocean to another. The turquoise Atlantic that surrounded Cuba was a lot warmer in Lance’s memory than the dark waters of Santa Cruz in northern California, but ocean was ocean. Looking at the globe on Papá's desk, Lance would wonder why all the oceans had different names when they were so clearly interconnected. One great big blue ocean. It was amazing how something that looked so simple and flat on a globe could be so magical and _endless_ in real life. The smell of sea salt, the seasonal wildlife, the shape of the rocks where the sea splashed against them with more power than he could fathom. He lived his life in two cycling states: 'at the beach’ and 'waiting to go back to the beach.’ Every day he was sure he fell a little bit more in love with the ocean than the day before.

But there was a little problem.

Or.. a big problem.

The ocean was in danger, which his mother would patiently explain after beach days as they gathered not only their trash but the trash left behind by tourists too. _Leave it in better condition than when you arrived,_ Mamá would say, and by the time Lance was ten that mantra was etched onto his very bones. He didn’t totally understand what was wrong with the ocean yet, but he knew it was humanity’s fault somehow, and he had made up his mind to be the hero the ocean needed.

“Marine Biologist!” he would exclaim whenever anyone asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I’m gonna save the ocean single-handedly!” Almost always they would chuckle at his exuberance and pat his head or ruffle his hair like they knew something he didn’t. Like the ocean was a Lois Lane who’d already hit the ground, but he was still cute for believing in Superman.

Lance wasn’t cute, okay. Or stupid. He was serious!

But, standing at the edge of the cliff his neighborhood rested on, trying to wrap his mind around just how mind-bogglingly _vast_ the ocean really was, it was easy to see why people patronized his dream. The ocean was big. It was the biggest thing on Earth, and Lance was just one kid.

Still, the ocean was like a second home to him. Marco had been teaching him how to surf since he was eight, and he was good enough to ride solo now. He was even better than Hunk! Whenever they weren’t at home playing video games or terrorizing Hunk’s neighbors, the Holts, they were down at the beach. Katie Holt (aka demon spawn, aka Pidge) hated swimming, but she would bring along her eReader and critique their form, and they would pool together their allowances for ice cream afterward, or pinball on the Boardwalk, or they’d go to the Wharf and watch the sea lions battling for the best slivers of sunlight on the salt-crusted rafters below and bet trading cards on which ones were going to win. The point is, even when they weren’t actively at the beach, their lives revolved around the ocean. That’s just what it was like living in an ocean town, Lance supposed. He’d never known anything else so he just couldn’t really picture life without the ocean. He didn’t think he’d gone more than a few full days in his life without laying eyes on the sea.

Which is maybe why he was so surprised on the last day of class before school let out that Hunk and Pidge friggin’ ditched him.

“But we were supposed to go to the beach together,” Lance grumbled, the ocean breeze competing with his voice in the receiver of his phone. He looked up and down the deserted beach, phone in one hand and surfboard tucked under in the other arm, savoring the sweet, sweet sight of empty, sun-drenched sand against blue ocean and bluer sky. Without any clouds to temper the sun, the ocean sparkled so brightly it was almost impossible to look directly at it. “It’s the last day before tourist season, you guys.”

 _“Change of plans, Lance, they’re demoing that new video game at the mall,”_ Pidge explained on the other end of the line. _“You know, the fighting one? It’s gonna be so cool!”_

“What, noo, come on! It’s the last day of empty beaches!”

 _“We go to the beach all the time,”_ she said, and Lance could hear the unmistakable sounds of the food court behind her voice, _“how often do we get to play unreleased games?”_

“Fine,” Lance huffed, “whatever. You guys have fun.”

_“Aw, come on, please?”_

“Nah, I’m already at the beach, I went early. I’m in my wetsuit and everything, I’m already wet and covered in sand.” Which wasn’t strictly true but… seriously. Last day of relatively empty beaches. Plus, he’d found something really cool yesterday that he desperately wanted to check out again. He’d been planning to show his glorious find to Hunk and Pidge today, before the stretch of beach near his house was swarming with out of towners, but the big reveal would have to wait for some other day, he supposed.

 _“Oh,”_ she backtracked, _“oh jeez, sorry,”_ (then quieter, muffled), _“Hunk wait up, he’s already—”_

“It’s fine,” Lance lied, “really guys, we’ll just hang out tomorrow. Have fun.”

 _“Mmm, if you say so…”_ Pidge said slowly.

“I say so! Adios Pigeon.”

_“Okay. Bye loser.”_

From far away Hunk screamed, _“TELL HIM I LOVE H—”_ but it was cut off with a click.

Despite feeling somewhat ditched, he ended up smiling as he kicked up sand down the beach, tucking his phone back into its waterproof sleeve as he went, and then into the little canvas satchel he wore across his shoulder, where it would be safe from the water. He meandered a ways away from the cliff his neighborhood rested on top of, way down the beach past the DO NOT SURF BEYOND THIS POINT sign sticking out of the sand toward a rockier area where you weren’t _technically_ supposed to surf because it was dangerous or whatever, but since this wasn't one of the big state-funded beaches there were no lifeguards around to stop you, and besides, that’s where all the best waves were. The water was still cold this far north even at the dawn of summer, but the half-sleeve wetsuit helped, and the sun was an unrelenting force of nature in the sky that beat down on Lance’s skin wherever it was exposed, sun rays glaring in his eyes as he paddled into the waves, warming him through and through. At this rate, he was going to be ninety percent freckles by the time he turned eleven in July.

Now, Lance wasn’t the best surfer in the world yet (despite what he boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen at every possible opportunity), but when he _really_ caught a wave, it was the single greatest feeling ever. He couldn’t explain it. It was the closest thing to flying that he thought he would ever experience.

It was during one of these moments that it happened.

He was mid-wave, the biggest wave of the day so far, about an hour after he’d first paddled out. He caught it at exactly the right moment and let out a loud shout of triumph as his board carried him down the growing wall of water. He leaned forward, arms outstretched, gaining speed, heart hammering itself right out of his ribcage in sheer exhilaration. The water curved over his head, tunneling him in a world of greenish-blue. He couldn’t stop grinning and reached his left hand out to graze the wall of the wave, leaving a streak of splattered foam in its wake. He watched it in joyous captivation until—

—his hand brushed something solid,

soft,

 _alive_ — _!_

Sucking in a panicked breath, Lance yanked his hand out of the water, eyes widening as a shadow moved in the deep where his hand had been. Shock froze his muscles solid and a lightning strike of fear accompanied it, drowning him in terror right as he realized he had lost his footing. He was going to wipe out.

A second after he became aware of this, he was already underwater.

Panic seized him. He struggled to orient himself as the wave continued to roll, tossing both Lance and the surfboard tied to his ankle, careless to his plight. As the ocean churned around him he kicked wildly for the surface, eyes squeezed shut against the sting of the salt water, and feeling all the salt the second he breached the surface and frantically began to look around for the creature he’d touched. It was soft, but not furry. Not an otter. Bay Dolphin? _(Wouldn’t it have breached by now if it was? Maybe it’s a shark.)_ Harbor seal? _(They’re playful and they’re jumpers. You would see it. It’s probably a shark.)_ Or maybe just a lost baby whale? _(Man, even the babies are huge! Wouldn't come this close to shore! It’s a SHARK!)_

By the time the wave steadied and he managed to clamber back onto his board, his blood had run cold in his veins. He knew sharks weren’t the cold-blooded killers Jaws made them out to be, he knew this, but there was an emotional disconnect between knowing this factually and then finding yourself actually sharing water space with one when you were ten years old, okay?

The paddle toward shore was agonizingly slow. It took centuries. After about a hundred waves Lance finally cleared the rocky section and made it back to the sand, jumping off his board to get his feet on solid ground. His was still waist deep but it did wonders for his heartbeat just to feel the wet sand under the soles of his feet, loose and unstable though it was. Sharks didn't come this close to shore.

Although...

Now that he was standing here, looking back at the sea, he was starting to feel a little silly about all that panic. Nothing had followed him as far as he could see, and he'd been looking hard. No fins poking out of the water, no eyes gleaming out of the dark. Maybe it _was_ just a seal.

After all, Lance had lived here his entire life and never once seen a shark except on TV. What were the odds? Nevermind the odds of actually being _attacked_ by one.

He was just working up the courage to dive back in when he saw something weird.

In the waves just south of the spot where he'd been surfing, about halfway between the rocks and the sand where Lance now stood, there was an emerging discoloration. Squinting, Lance struggled to identify it. At a glance, it looked like the reddish seaweed that clung to the surface for miles in some places around here, mistakable for blood from far away if you didn't know better. Maybe it was just a really thick clump of it, detached from the kelp forest?

No, there were weird white glittery patches, almost like, like a giant red _something_ stuck inside a tangled mesh net. And it seemed heavy. It wasn't obeying the current or the waves. Was it an animal? Was this the thing he had touched?

Transfixed, Lance watched it as it slowly lost the fight with the current, edging closer and closer to shore with every passing wave. He’d seen a sick harbor seal washed up exactly the same way once. Had stayed with it for three hours until someone from the Sea Life Rehabilitation Center showed up, only to tell Lance that it was too sick to save and to just let it go. When the next wave crashed and finally left the creature exposed on the sand, Lance knew in his heart before he’d even fully registered what he was seeing that he was not calling the SLRC this time.

He was going to save this one if it killed him.

Surfboard dragging behind him still attached to his ankle, Lance splashed through the waves to get to the creature. “Oh my god,” he whispered to himself, “oh my _god.”_

The creature— _mer_ , his brain screamed emphatically, although the ethereal vision in front of him flatly defied any base Disney depiction—looked up at him dazedly as Lance reached his side, surfboard skidding in the sand and sticking.

“...You,” he said, water spilling out of his mouth. “Walker..” Gills on the side of his neck closed as he took a deep breath of air. His eyes were glazed over. “You were walking on the water.”

“Wha—did you just talk? In English? Can you speak English?! Are you okay? Why’d you wash up, where are you hurt, can you breathe out here, should I throw you back in—?”

The creature snarled, eyes widening and the glossy look clearing. He snapped from dazed and confused to full attention in one second flat, whipping his tail away as Lance crouched down and reached out to touch it. The white mesh net wasn't a net at all—it was a network of translucent fins, light as gossamer, sprouting from not only the end of the mer’s red scaled tail, but the sides too, and the back, kinda like—like a betta fish or something. “ _Talker_ too, apparently,” he hissed, trying and failing to roll away from Lance and hissing again, this time in pain. “Don't touch me,” he warned as Lance reached again. Okay, so he had the temperament of a betta fish too.

Wildly, Lance glanced up the beach. It was still mostly deserted, but there were cars going by every five seconds up above on Cliff Drive, and one couple sunbathing farther down the secluded beach, and that had his stomach churning even though he was pretty sure they weren't looking this way at all and might even be sleeping. “You can't stay here man,” Lance urged, “there are people everywhere—”

That caught his attention. “Humans? Where?!” Despite his panic, he made no move to get back to deeper water.

“Everywhere!” Lance exclaimed, not even bothering to remind the guy that Lance was a human too, duh. “This is a public beach. If you don't wanna be seen then you gotta get lost fast. Why’d you wash up?” Lance worried. “Are you hurt?”

The creature frowned, casting shifty eyes up the beach in every direction before sighing in frustration. “Yes.” Gingerly he flipped his tail over using his hands and pulled one of the gossamer fins out of the way to show a long gash on his side, where his thigh would've been if he had legs. As Lance looked the wound continued to bleed, mixing with seawater as it trickled down and stained the base of the opal-white fin sprouting down the side of his tail a sickly pink color.

“Knew it,” Lance said. Healthy sea creatures didn't just wash up like this. “Hmm, okay, so you're not dying.”

“Of course I'm not dying,” the boy replied haughtily, as if he was smarter than Lance or something even though he didn't look a day older than Lance did. While his arms were crossed and his eyes closed smugly, Lance took the opportunity to poke at the wound. “OW, that HURTS, you jerk!”

Lance glared. What a sassy little fish. Jesus. “You’re not _dying_ , but you can't swim either, obviously.” In the ocean that was a death sentence and the guy surely knew it, because his pale face turned an angry shade of red closer to that of his tail. “We gotta get you somewhere out of sight where you can heal until you can swim again or else you'll just keep washing up on the beach. Lucky for you, you stumbled upon a good Samaritan.”

“A what?”

“Just trust me. I'm gonna help you back into the water now before anyone comes walking down this part of the beach. Cool?”

The mer nodded, still wary but eager at the prospect of getting back into the water. Lance unhooked his surfboard from his ankle and tossed it farther ashore where the waves couldn't get it, making a mental note to come back for it later, then grabbed the mer around the chest from behind and heaved him upward—which was not easy because he was ten and this guy’s tail was _heavy_ —and stumbled into the next oncoming wave, half carrying and half dragging the mer along with him.

Lance half expected him to dart away as soon as he was submerged. But he must have been struggling against the current for a long time because he didn't seem in any hurry to extract himself from Lance's arms. He just hung there, exhausted, his tail and fins drifting in the current as Lance dug his heels into the sand against the retreating wave.

“This is gonna be a long trip,” he warned. “I have a place in mind but it's on the other side of that rocky cliff up that way, with those boulders sticking up offshore. See it? I’m gonna hug the shoreline till we get there. Hang onto me underwater and don’t surface till I pull you up.”

“Can you even get past those rocks?” the guy answered skeptically as he eyed the area Lance was referring to, and Lance scoffed in offense.

“Watch me.”

Last week Lance had been up to no good, as usual. The shallow cliff up ahead which his neighborhood rested at the top of looked like this: there was the last row of sea-facing houses (including Lance's), then Cliff Drive (the one-lane coastal road), then a sidewalk, a splash of wildflowers, a useless old fence, and the drop-off toward the sea.

Except it wasn't a sheer drop-off. It was more a series of smaller cliffs all stacked on top of each other at odd angles until finally hitting the waterline. It was tempting, to say the least, and Lance had finally given in to the temptation last week. He knew it wasn't the brightest idea to test his luck climbing down the side of the cliff, and he knew he’d be grounded for like three years if he got caught, but did that stop him? No. However, he did have a brief panicked moment of _'I’m about to die’_ when he reached the second lowest 'step’ above the rocky waters and promptly fell straight through the ground.

He'd tumbled through damp earth down a dark, damper slope with soil assaulting his mouth and eyes and ears until he’d fallen right on over the edge of a rock and landed with a splash in freezing water, promptly swallowing a bunch of it. It took a good minute of coughing and floundering to find his way back to the edge, and to figure out that he'd fallen into some kind of small cave; a pocket of ocean trapped inside the rocks. It had taken him almost ten minutes to climb back up the wet slope he’d slipped down to get out of the dark and back into the light of day, and then fifteen more to get back up the cliff, and all in all it was one of the most terrifying experiences of his young life (more so than his more recent shark scare, even). Still… later that evening he'd knotted a makeshift ladder out of rope from the garage, and gone back the next day to hang the ladder down the slippery slope into the cave, along with a battery powered lantern that nobody would miss. In the light of his lantern, it turned out to be more of a magical and picturesque grotto than a fearsome black void.

The plan had been to share his secret grotto with Hunk and Pidge asap, but now… maybe he'd keep it secret for a while longer.

It was almost a forty-minute walk from this part of the beach to the cliff by his neighborhood, thanks to the tide and the lead-weighted fishboy clinging to Lance’s legs. When he reached the rocky area he had to move in sporadic bursts to avoid being washed away, bracing himself against the rocks at the height of every wave. Fishboy helped with that. Once they’d edged completely around the cliff Lance stopped beneath the ridge where he'd fallen through and pulled Fishboy to the surface.

He explained about the existence of the grotto, and the water inside. "There must be some kind of opening letting water into it somewhere below between all these rocks,” he elaborated, although he couldn't know for sure where it was. “There's anemones and starfish inside so there has to be a decently sized entrance. I need you to see if you can get in that way.” If not, they'd have to wait until dark so Lance could carry him in from above. ...Somehow. That would be fun.

Fishboy narrowed his eyes at the cliffside, then the water, then the cliffside again.

“Hey. Look,” Lance reasoned, voice straining as he braced himself again against another wave, “this is crazy for me too. But I'm going to help you, okay? I promise. I just need you to trust me.” He grinned wide, hoping he looked more confident about this idea than he felt.

Fishboy’s look of uncertainty softened into resignation. “Fine. Don’t really have any other choice, do I?”

“Well thanks for the vote of confidence,” Lance sassed back as the boy released his hold on Lance. “Try not to drown, fishboy.”

The boy just rolled his eyes. “Not possible, moron.”

Lance glared as the boy let the next wave take him under and wash him back out of the shallow rocky area toward the deeper section where he then slipped under the waves. _Dear diary. Found a merman today,_ he thought to himself as he scaled up from the sea level to the place where he'd first fallen into the grotto, _saved his life. Too bad he’s the biggest most ungrateful jerk I've ever met._

_Why couldn't it have been Ariel!_

By the time he got up there, he'd scraped his hands and feet up pretty badly. But he made it. After catching his breath he went straight to the palm fronds he’d used to cover the entrance hole where he’d fallen straight through the loose dirt yesterday afternoon. A quick test of the rope ladder he'd anchored to a rock outcropping closer to the rest of the cliff showed it was still holding strong, so he adjusted his satchel behind him and climbed down into the dark opening. As he reached the end of the rope and tried to scrub the mud off his knees, he decided he was gonna have to dig out the entrance into something more permanent and stable, to make getting in here less messy.

After a solid five minutes sitting on the stone at the water's edge beside his stolen lantern, Lance was beginning to worry that there was no way in from the other side large enough for Fishboy to get through. But right when he was considering climbing back out and going in search of him, the boy popped up, scaring the absolute _bejeezus_ out of Lance (although he would never cop to that in this lifetime).

“Oh thank god,” Lance breathed, getting to his feet as the boy struggled toward the edge. It was weird to watch a creature with fins and a fishtail swim through the water relying almost solely on two human-looking arms. “I thought maybe you had actually drowned, and then I would’ve felt so bad because I joked about it and—”

“Will you—shut _up_ —already,” the boy grunted between disjointed, exhausted swim strokes.

Lance snapped his mouth shut. “I was _gonna_ fix your tail but now I don't know. It might be hard to do without talking. Maybe I’ll just leave you here.”

Fishboy's eyes went wide as Lance turned his back toward him and took a step toward the rope ladder, where the smallest patch of sunlight shone into the grotto in a cloud of dusty gold. “W-wait! Wait.”

The sudden desperation in his voice punched the anger straight out of Lance's gut. He looked back over his shoulder, and sympathy flooded him at the sight of the boy clinging to the edge of the lake, sunlight reflecting back at Lance from his wide, brown eyes. “I'm not really abandoning you, jeez. I'm gonna go get some supplies to patch up your tail okay? I'll be back in less than an hour.”

The boy seemed mollified. “Okay.”

With that Lance made his way to the ladder. “Oh,” he added last minute as he neared the top, turning around to take in one last glance at the mythical creature, “and the name’s Lance, by the way.”

Fishboy mulled that over. Eyes half-lidded, he leaned one folded arm atop the flat slate at the lake’s edge, then leaned his cheek on it, looking up at Lance so that his long black hair splayed out like seaweed over his arm in the white light emanating from the battery powered lantern behind him, shining in membrane shaped sunbursts through the fins that stuck out through his hair where ears should’ve been. Almost like horns. Or fragments of a halo. Lance swallowed, wondering if perhaps this was all some kind of mega-vivid fever dream.

“...Sooo do you have one of those?” Lance pressed. “A name? Or am I gonna have to keep calling you fishboy?” _God, I have to do everything around here._

“Oh. It’s—” and then he made some high pitched dolphin-esque noise that sounded something like _Kri-i-it_.

Okay then. “Yep, I can totally pronounce that.” Lance cleared his throat, opened his mouth, tried it, and failed epically. What came out was the saddest, squeakiest noise he’d ever made. _Abort, abort. I can’t pronounce that._

 _Kri-i-it_ burst into laughter, and it rang inside the grotto. Lance’s body reacted in a physical way—like the time he’d been inside a church tower in Oregon when the bell rung, and he’d felt the vibration of the universe from his teeth to his ribs to the soles of his feet. He still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of the fishboy’s laughter when he trailed off to a giggle and said, “You can just call me Keith. It’s what Shiro used to call me. He couldn’t pronounce it either. And... I actually kinda like it better, anyway.”

“Uhh… Okay,” Lance said slowly like some kind of dumb stupid idiot. Interesting. So he’d met another human before. Made friends with him, even. “Keith it is, then.”

All the way up the cliff back to his house he wondered who the heck Shiro was. He’d barely just met Keith and he kinda hated him a smidge (okay, hate was a strong word, but this guy was a _bit_ of a jerk)… and yet, the prospect of sharing him with some other person who also couldn’t pronounce _Kri-i-it_ made his blood boil with jealousy.

 

 

**. . .**

 

_Just act normal, just act normal, just act normal._

He entered his house as casually as he could, calling out a greeting to Mamá where she was sitting at the dining table reading a book, then doubling back when Papá yelled at him for tracking wet sand in again, and took his shoes off by the door before hurrying on down the hallway, grabbing his empty cinch-tie backpack from the coat rack and then ducking into the bathroom. Once there, he shut and locked the door behind him.

Okay. So, there was a lot of stuff in the medicine drawer. As he sifted through it—ointments, rolls of gauze, little bottles with labels that meant nothing to him—he felt the beginnings of anxiety creeping forward from that dark spot that hovered at the back of his brain. The more he looked, the more overwhelmed he felt by the task he'd delegated to himself without a second thought. What did he think he was doing, anyway? What did he know about anything? He didn’t know what any of this stuff did, or how to use it. He was just a kid. Wasn’t this kind of beyond his expertise? Maybe he should... should just pass Keith off to an adult or something. Maybe he was going to make the injury worse by trying to help when he was anything but a marine biologist. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place. His hand tightened around the drawer handle, his knuckles going pale with the effort it took not to slam it closed in frustration as the assorted items blurred in his head. Maybe all he was doing was interfering with natural selection, like that one marine life rehabilitationist had told him scoldingly when he got angry that they weren’t going to save that seal he found last year.

_What? No._

He blinked, looking up into his own eyes in the mirror in a moment of quiet disbelief over the fact that such a thought had come from inside his own head.

 _That’s stupid. That guy was stupid and you know it._ But his eyebrows furrowed downward over the effort it took to make that sound convincing, even internally.

A loud knock startled him so bad that he dropped the mysterious bottle he was holding; it clattered into the sink as Laura’s voice echoed through the door. “Lance, hurry up! I have to pee and Marco’s taking a shower in the other bathroom!” Oh thank god, it was just Laura. In a moment of weakness, he opened the door and yanked her inside, closing it again behind her as she yelped with confusion.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he pleaded, and Sibling Stealth Mode instantly activated in her eyes. She was already nodding in agreement to keep the secret before he'd even divulged it. “So I found this.. seal,” he lied. “Don’t worry, it’s really docile and friendly,” he double-lied, “but it’s hurt, it has this gash and can’t swim, and I want to help it but I don’t know what any of this stuff _does_. Help me,” he pleaded. She’d wanted to be a doctor since she was five, so if anyone knew what to do, it would be her. She was always reading those doctor books...

Laura stood there frozen for a minute while Lance clasped his hands under his chin, silently begging. Then, finally, she sighed and rolled her head a bit, tossing her long brown hair over her shoulders before settling her gaze on the open drawer. “You’re _insane_ ,” she said. “But I know you’re gonna do this no matter what I say, so I might as well make sure you don’t hurt the poor thing even more than it’s already been hurt. Okay, so here’s what you should do…”

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

“Ow!”

“Hold still!”

“No! Why are you pouring _firewater_ on it? Do you even know what you’re doing?!”

“It’s just water and soap you idiot,” he retorted, “and it’s good for you, and I’m _ten_ , so no, I don’t exactly have a medical degree.”

“Clearly. OW.”

“You wanna do it yourself?”

“Yes, I do,” Keith said hotly, and snatched the repurposed milk gallon from Lance’s hands, spilling a bunch of it onto the rocks in the process.

Lance rolled his eyes and pulled the medical tape, gauze, and antibiotic out of the first aid kit while Keith gritted his teeth and pulled the cut open with his thumb and forefinger so he could pour a bit more of the warm soapy water into it, washing away the ocean that clung to and inside the exposed flesh where his scales had been sliced clean through. Lance fought against the queasy feeling that welled up in his throat at the sight. If Keith could handle pouring soap into a gash like that without crying, Lance could sure as heck could handle looking at it without heaving up his lunch.

“Okay, that's good enough,” Lance said, and Keith let out a small sigh of relief when Lance took the gallon back and scooted forward with his supplies. “How did you even get this anyway,” he wondered as he placed a generous glob of the weird semi-translucent ointment Laura had put in his bag (more than half the tube) onto the cut and gently smeared it in.

“Hunting,” Keith said. “A shark smelled my catch and came to check it out. I should've just let her have it. She was pissed when I didn't.” Lance glanced up in shock. Keith’s eyebrows were furrowed down so far they'd almost converged on his nose. “It was _mine_ though.”

“Wait wait wait,” Lance reeled, “a _shark bit you?!”_

Keith scoffed at that—a default setting for him apparently. “No. I’m too fast for that, are you kidding? I got myself on my own knife on accident as I was getting away.”

“Your..” Lance's eyes slipped down to the satchel hanging at Keith's side, a lot larger than the tiny one Lance used for his phone while he surfed. It looked like it was made out of some mixture of raw materials like leather and braided seaweed, but he couldn't be sure. When Keith opened it he tried for a peek inside, but didn't catch much of anything before Keith had drawn something out that promptly caught Lance's full attention. “Woah.”

The short dagger caught sparkles of roaming sunlight as Keith turned it over in his hand, showing off the amethyst engraving on the backside. “Yeah,” Keith sighed, a frustrated and somewhat defeated edge creeping into his voice, “it’s a good knife. I'm... still kinda figuring out how to use it though.”

The silence turned awkward as Lance pieced everything together. (Or, maybe it was just Lance.)

“You're.. on your own then?”

“Yeah.”

“That— That sucks,” Lance offered, for lack of anything better to say. Sympathy twisted in his chest as he pressed the gauze pad to the wound. No wonder Keith was so pissy. Maybe Lance would pissy too if he had to live all alone in the deep, dark ocean, fighting off sharks who wanted his dinner…

Keith tried his best to lift his tail so that Lance could use the gauze roll and tape to secure the pad tightly over the wound, sealing it away from the air. “There was a fisherman who used to share his catch with me, but he's gone now too.”

The placement of the side and back fins made this so difficult. Over and around, under and back again. “Shiro?” he wondered.

Keith grunted with the effort of manually moving his tail around to accommodate Lance’s wrapping. “Yeah. He went off to fight in some war or something last year, I dunno. My dad used to say humans are always at war. Is that true?”

Tying off the gauze right at Keith's hip, in a place where he could tighten it himself if he needed to, Lance shrugged. “I guess so,” he admitted. “Especially America. Shiro’s in Iraq probably,” Lance said, but he could tell that word meant absolutely nothing to Keith. “He’ll come back,” Lance went on, feeling like he couldn't just leave it at that. “I can show you on a map if you want, where Shiro is.”

“Really?” Keith visibly lit up. “That would, uh. I would like that.”

Dangit, he was so _earnest_. It was hard to stay annoyed at him even though Lance kinda wanted to since because he still lowkey wished he'd found an Ariel rather than a Keith.

“Cool. Right,” Lance said, switching gears and latching the first aid kit shut before springing to his feet. “So how long can you be out of the water? This will probably heal faster if you try to keep it dry.”

“Ugh.” Keith glares at the gauze wrapped in odd zigzags across his tail, poking in between fins, already somewhat wet. “I can stay out of the water however long I want I guess, I just.. don't like it.”

Tough. “Okay, well then a week or so won't kill you.”

“A _week or so?_ ” Keith wheezed, but Lance was already moving around him toward the sunlight.

“I gotta go,” he said, “my mom's making dinner soon and I have a strict curfew, and I still gotta go back for my board before someone—”

“Wait, you're leaving?”

“Uhh yeah, it's not like I can just live in here for a week. I gotta go home to my family. Stuff to do, places to be...” And maybe that was a _bit_ of a lie since tomorrow was the dawn of summer vacation between fifth and sixth grade, and he had absolutely no plans to be anywhere but the beach in the first place, but it’s not like he was about to tell Keith that. He had an image to maintain.

Keith wilted. “Oh.”

“Um. Are you gonna be okay?”

“Just— what if that tunnel I swam through caves in?” Keith blurted out. “There's no fish in here. I can't stay here for a whole week! And if that entrance caves in I’ll _die_. This place is too small. I hate it.”

“You won't die,” Lance assured him. “Because I'll be back, okay? This place is safe, that's why I brought you here. Nothing's coming in except me. I'll sneak you some food after my family falls asleep tonight, and I’ll be back tomorrow too with more first aid stuff. Okay?”

The anxious and cornered look remained on Keith's face, and he still looked like he wanted nothing more than to dive back into the water and swim far, far away. But Lance knew he couldn't. And he might only be ten, but he recognized the gravity of the promise he was committing to, and he poured as much of that out of his eyes and onto Keith as he could.

“Okay,” Keith finally relented, sinking into the water with a sad splash and the unmistakable air of _‘I’m basically putting my life in your hands here.’_

The doubt was unnecessary. Lance kept his word and came back to the grotto every single day over the following week.

Smuggling food from home for Keith was crazy easy. There were so many people in his family all coming and going at all times of the day that nobody took any heed when Lance shoved an ungodly amount of snacks into his backpack and declared he’d be gone till dinnertime or looked at him twice if he poured some of the leftover fricasé de pollo into a thermos and hid it in the back of the fridge behind the milk so no one would take it. Nobody was ever awake yet when he slipped out at dawn into the rolling fog. California morning was a world of shimmering gray, the air like chilled sparkles against Lance’s skin, like a powdered-down version of the ocean spray. Mornings were his favorite time of day because when the fog rolled in it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. The horizon line was out there, somewhere, but Lance didn’t know where. Nor did he care. It didn’t matter in the morning anyway.

The gash on Keith’s tail stopped bleeding and scabbed over and with constant advice from Laura, he managed to keep it from getting infected. Lance had to spend his weekly allowance on more gauze and antibiotic to avoid raising suspicions at home by using all of theirs, but Keith didn’t know or care what money or allowance was, so he was as ungrateful as ever about it. Lance wasn’t even sure why he was giving his first week of summer to this guy when his response to most of Lance’s Kindhearted Valiant Kindness was to turn up his nose and insist he was fine and that he didn't need any further help, even though he clearly did. Whenever Keith pushed it too far, Lance would succumb to irritation and imply that he wouldn’t be coming back tomorrow.

That usually ended it, because Keith would snap his mouth shut and come over with this weird vulnerable expression that was unbecoming and uncharacteristic all at once, and guilt would slither into Lance’s belly, and Lance would clear his throat and say, “But uh... not really,” and Keith’s shoulders would untense, and they’d be right back at square one again.

It was a bizarre breed of combative friendship that Lance had never really had with anyone else before. Keith was the most hot-headed person Lance had ever met, the first one who went toe to toe with him and matched every single jab Lance offered with an equal comeback. It drove him insane, but, it was also kind of fun. It was exciting. _Keith_ was exciting. And maybe he was kind of salty at first that he’d found Keith instead of, you know, Ariel, but it turned out you couldn’t spend the majority of a week holed up in a cave with someone without starting to feel like you were friends with them in some weird way. Granted, Lance didn’t _have_ to spend every waking minute of the day with him, but Keith was there and Lance was curious. Sue him. This was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him, and he wanted to soak up as much of this as he could before it was too late. Before Keith was gone.

Keith… was not a big talker though. At least, at first. Lance was persistent.

The first day was a lot of sitting around and snapping at each other since Keith consistently mistook Lance’s attempts at conversation for interrogation. After asking Keith what he had in that satchel of his, Keith pointedly pushed it into the water without breaking eye contact, and Lance didn’t see the satchel again for a solid few days.

The second day, Lance dug an old paper map out of the garage and bought it down to the grotto to show Keith where Iraq was, and after that Keith was a little nicer and talked a little more. He found out that Keith liked more than just seafood (“Shiro used to bring me fruit and other weird human junk from a farmer’s market,” he admitted) and that was when he started getting creative with the food. Goodbye stealing raw fish from the freezer and thawing them on the rocks above the grotto's entrance, hello stealing all the Gushers and Poptarts from the pantry and blaming it on Beni when questioned about it by an agitated Marco.

The third day was when Hunk and Pidge started to think he was seriously mad at them for ditching him on Friday, and thus avoiding them, and he had to sweet-talk his way out of a ‘we’re sorry for ditching you’ trip to the Boardwalk. Keith did not know what a rollercoaster was, or arcade games, or cotton candy, so he was as ungrateful as ever for Lance’s selfless sacrifice. This was also the day that he remembered the old walkie talkies sitting at the back of his closet, and brilliantly gifted one to Keith. It was supposed to be in case of emergency, but it was mostly used for Keith bugging Lance whenever he wasn’t at the grotto about when he was coming back.

The fourth day was when Keith had a raging meltdown, proclaiming loud enough to alert the whole city to the fact that he was “literally dying of boredom and claustrophobia.” So Lance went home and brought all his handheld gaming devices back to the grotto with him, which they played with for seven straight hours until all the batteries died. Keith’s slightly webbed fingers weren’t much of a hindrance to playing, but Lance found it funny to watch for some reason. It also turned out that while Keith didn't bat an eye at the magic of portable video games, he was absolutely confounded by the machinations of cotton candy when Lance brought him some to try. He demanded a full scientific explanation, which Lance found even funnier than watching him try to catch a wild Butterfree.

The fifth day was when Lance spent sunup to sundown in the grotto without leaving once. Keith knew how to read English too, apparently (“My dad,” Keith explained, “he wanted me to be able to read human signs”), which Lance also found funny for some reason, which made Keith angry, but somehow led to them reading comic books for the entire day and then arguing over which superheroes would win in a fight against each other. This was also the day that Keith finally let Lance look inside that mysterious handmade bag he carried around, giving into Lance’s pestering with a frustrated hiss and tossing the sopping wet bag at Lance’s feet. It turned out to be totally empty, save for that knife. What a letdown.

The sixth day was when Keith explained about his parents, after a full hour of Lance rambling about his own family while he taught Keith how to play UNO. Mama, Papa, his older brother Marco who could probably lift a truck over his head if he felt like it, his slightly younger sister Laura who wanted to be a brain surgeon, his way younger siblings Benito and Gabriela who had spent most of their time this year fighting over whose turn it was to play on the PS3, his Cuban grandparents who still lived back home, his Irish-immigrant grandparents who lived over in San Jose, his cousins Alejandra and Vera who lived—

“My dad died three years ago,” Keith dropped mid-conversation with absolutely no buildup. “There was an oil spill when he was a kid that permanently messed his lungs up, so. I thought he had more time left though,” he said, his voice oddly detached. Dissociated from the memory as he focused on the two cards left in his hands, deciding which one to lay down. “So did he. Okay, wild card. I pick, uh... red, I guess.”

“You _guess?”_

“Also, draw four. Also, Uno.” He waved his last card around with faux enthusiasm. “Wow I’m good at this game,” he deadpanned.

Slowly sitting up on the towel where he was sprawled out, Lance looked over at Keith. He was all stretched out by the water's edge, looking at the chink of sunlight from the entrance where it sliced the lake into two distinct halves. “What about your mom?” Lance asked when Keith didn’t elaborate.

“She’s been gone since I was a baby,” he said. And then— “She turned into a bird. Don’t forget to draw four cards, I’m watching you, Lance.”

“She…”

_What?_

Lance drew four cards and laid one of them one down without thinking about it. “Really?”

“Uh-huh,” Keith said, and he sounded so sure of it that Lance didn’t have the heart to point out the absurdity and impossibility of such a thing. Keeping his eyes cast firmly downward, Keith reached out and dropped his final card on top of Lance’s yellow 8—another wild card. Oh. Okay. So he would have won no matter what color he picked.

_She turned into a bird._

Maybe that’s just what his dad had told him since he was so little when it happened? And he just believed it? Kinda how Lance’s parents had told Gabi that their golden retriever went away to live on a farm because Gabi was only two years old when he died.

And anyway, who was Lance to question the folktales of merpeople when he himself was playing cards with a folktale of humanity?

A slew of questions churned through him as he sat there on his week-old towel, musty with sea mist, the steady sounds of the still sea sloshing against the edges of their grotto. He wanted to know _everything_ about Keith and he felt pressed for time, suddenly. The mer’s wound was closing up and he was starting to keep the lower half of his tail dipped in the water more often than not. But of the hundred questions flitting through Lance’s brain like half-boiled bubbles, the one that actually broke the surface surprised him.

“Doesn’t it ever get lonely?” Lance asked, tossing his bloated deck onto the discard pile.

Keith looked up at him slowly, almost like he was going to ask Lance to clarify. _Is what lonely? Having no family? Having no friends? Knowing none of your own kind or where to find them or where you came from or where you’re going to end up?_

“The ocean,” Lance said before Keith was forced to ask, and his words lingered for a long moment in the watery silence.

“No,” Keith said, finally. But it sounded like a lie.

Lance wasn’t entirely sure when it moved from ‘ _saving a sea creature I found’_ to ‘ _saving Keith,’_ but if he had to pinpoint a moment, it was probably that one.

It was crazy how quickly the grotto became a permanent landscape in Lance’s life. Like his bedroom, or the living room, or the courtyard at the elementary school, or the wooden fort in the Holts’ backyard, the pockmarked, rolling shape of that flooded cave became familiar and dear and (strangely, for as unpredictable a creature as Keith) predictable. Like walking into Hunk’s house and knowing he’d hear his tama and tinati singing along to that old radio in the kitchen while they cooked together. Like walking into the Luna Café downtown where his parents brought the family every Sunday and knowing he’d see their waitress-turned-family-friend Rhonda there, smiling at them over the notepad she always held but never used. Like going down to the beach and knowing that the ocean would be there. Except—

—except that Lance came back on the seventh day, and Keith was gone.

It was somewhat surreal, the creeping realization Keith wasn’t here waiting for him. He looked around the small cave a few times anyway, even though there wasn’t all that much surface area for Keith to be and no crevices deep enough to hide him from sight. The hollow interior was vaguely UFO shaped, with most of the rocky ledge being confined to the right side of the earthy entrance slope, which Lance had already begun to dig into more of a ‘staircase’ shape while he’d been down here all week. He moved off the earth onto the damp slate, picking up the lantern and holding it out as he went, despite the fact that Keith was obviously, glaringly, futilely absent. The gauze and pad that had been covering his wound lay unraveled on the pile of towels Lance had smuggled out of the laundry room, Keith’s favorite resting spot, next to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which he’d left overnight, and the pile of forgotten UNO cards.

Sitting down on the towel, Lance picked up a couple loose pebbles and tossed them into the glassy water one by one, calling out Keith’s name each time. But it was useless. The water here was only about fifteen feet deep, and with the sunshine streaming in combined with the lantern, Lance could see the rolling shape of the algae-riddled rocks at the bottom, and could even make out a patch of barnacles and starfish. But no Keith.

The thing was, Lance knew this would happen eventually. He just.. he didn’t expect to feel this sad about it.

It hit him hard and deep, the sudden loss. “Didn’t even say thank you,” he muttered angrily, tossing one last rock into the lake, watching as it settled into the depths. But his words sounded as hollow as this cave. _Didn’t even say goodbye,_ is what he was really thinking as he rested his forehead on his knees.

He just felt like… like this was it _._

Like it was what? He didn’t know, okay? Just, something. A great big something.

But now it was gone.

 _Keith_ was gone.

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

The next morning came up on him way too fast, and he laid in bed sulking until Gabi came to see why he wasn’t up yet, and he ended up faking a stomach ache so he didn’t have to go out and talk to the family or put on a smile for Hunk and Pidge. All he wanted to do was lie here and pout. It was like the last week had been nothing but a stupid dream. The coolest most exciting thing that ever happened to him was over. So whatever, call him dramatic if you want, but he was in mourning.

He knew it was bad when he ended up only eating half his dinner, dodging and prolonging his faked illness into the next day too. That was probably a bad move because Pidge and Hunk took it on themselves to come by to check up and visit him even though he told them multiple times in the group chat that he was fine and really they didn’t have to.

 

* * *

**[←]  Honk, Pidgeotto [:]**

**Saturday** _\- 3:09pm_

**(** Seriously, you don’t have to come over **)**

 **(** I just wanna lay here **)**

 **(** **H** **) (** Dude **)**

     **(** That’s how we know somethings wrong!!!  **)**

 **(** **P** **)** **(** Yeah usually you beg us to bring u stuff **)**

        **(** And to hang out so you can complain about it **)**

        **(** What gives, lancey lance **)**

 **(** NOTHING ok? **)**

 **(** Maybe I just wanna be alone. Jeez. **)**

 **(** **P** **) (** Sucks for you then **)**

    **(** Your mom just let us in lol **)**

* * *

 

Groaning, Lance pressed his phone to his forehead as two sharp knocks sounded on his closed bedroom door. “Knock knock, bitch!” came Pidge’s muffled voice, followed directly by a “ _Language_ , _mija!”_ from elsewhere in the house, and an even farther away _“Knock knock, bitch,”_ parroted by a laughing Benito.

“It's unlocked,” Lance grumbled, rolling over to face the window as the door opened.

It took about one second for Pidge to pounce on his bed, and two seconds for Hunk’s big hand to find its way to his forehead. Lance squirmed away guiltily. “It's not a fever.”

“Then what’s the deal, Lance?” Hunk worried. “I know when you're sick, and when you're upset about something. Come on.”

Trust in Hunk and Pidge to not believe him for a second. Dang, they always knew when he was faking sick. “You got me,” Lance grumbled, because there was no point in attempting to lie once they'd already guessed it. “I'm not really sick, okay, I'm… Ugh. You're just gonna make fun of me.” They wouldn't believe him for an instant, and besides, he wasn't sure he wanted to share Keith's existence with them anyway. His friends were major science geeks and they would almost certainly run straight to Pidge’s parents (both scientists) with the discovery, or to the university or something.

The sound of the bedroom door closing roused him from his sulking. He sat up, confused at the serious look on Pidge’s face where she leaned against the Star Wars poster on the back of his door.

“Just this once, we won't make fun of you,” she teased. “Now spill.”

Sitting up, Lance scooted over to make room for them on his bed. Okay, they weren't going to let this go. Time for a little white lie. He'd gotten good at those this week.

“Fine. I… met someone. At the beach,” he clarified when they looked perplexed, “the day you guys ditched me. His name's Keith, and we've been hanging out every single day since then. I thought we were becoming real friends, but then, yesterday he just didn't show up to our meeting spot. And I.. I don’t know what I did wrong,” he ended weakly, his voice getting thick and wobbly despite his attempt to keep it level.

“Aw,” Hunk cooed as Lance pulled his knees to his chest, letting the blanket fall off and burying his face into his forearms. The weight of Hunk's arm came down on his back, followed soon after by Pidge’s tiny stick arm. Her awkward side-hug wasn't nearly as comforting as Hunk's well-practiced one, but it meant a lot, considering Pidge was about as averse to physical affection as Lance was to mint-flavored ice cream.

“Don't take it personally," she advised with soft practicality. "It’s probably not even your fault. I bet he was a tourist.”

“Yeah,” Hunk agreed. “Maybe he just had to go home, you know?”

Lance laughed wetly into his knees. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe.”

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

The next day he was back to hanging out with Hunk and Pidge on the Wharf like usual and was starting to feel like himself again.  It was only after a long day of fun that he went back to the grotto to put a lid on this whole thing, emotionally. He had some kind of loose idea in his head of how to say goodbye to a pipe dream, and it was probably gonna be super dramatic and involve throwing the lantern into the water and flipping off the walls and sticking his tongue out like a five-year-old. He was so deep in this angry fantasy that he almost fell down the slope into the damp entrance of the cave, because Keith was _there_.

“KEITH!” he shrieked, catching himself at the bottom of the slope and running through the grotto toward Keith where he hovered at the water's edge, his arms folded on the rocky ledge. “You’re back!”

Letting his head fall to the side on his arms, Keith looked up at him with puffy red eyes. “What do you mean _I'm_ back? _You_ were the one who didn’t come for three days. You said you would keep coming back here but then you just didn't. Hunting has sucked _so hard_ , you don't even know. I've been eating seaweed and clams like I used to have to right after my dad died. I hate you. You said you were coming back...”

Guilt flooded Lance’s stomach even as he reeled, trying to come to terms with this revelation. “I did come. I came three days ago and you weren't here. I thought…” He took a moment to soak in the genuine hurt expression on Keith's face, the way he buried as much of it in his forearms as he could. Grimacing, he knelt down at the water's edge. “I'm sorry. I thought you left for good.”

Keith blinked, mouth falling ajar. He looked mortally offended at the very suggestion. “I would have said goodbye if I was leaving for good. I was just…” Behind him in the water, the tip of his tail breached, briefly slapping the surface before going under once more. “Testing out my tail,” he finished. “It's a lot better. It still hurts, but I can swim again at least. Not very fast, but I can move.”

“So are you—are you _gonna_ leave?”

Keith shrugged. “I dunno.”

“I mean, because you could always just... stay. This is a safe place to sleep, right? And I can keep bringing you food till you're fast enough to hunt again, and there's plenty food to hunt nearby when you're up to it, and.. and I could bring you other stuff too. Like more comics and games...” He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. Butterflies fluttered in his stomach and he tried to stamp on them, embarrassed at the very fact that he was embarrassed, because it's not like Keith was a _girl_ or something, jeez. Unfortunately this was a vicious cycle, and the longer the silence stretched on, the hotter his face grew.

Aimless but thoughtful, Keith bobbed in the water. “I do like having a place to sleep. This grotto—I hate to admit it, but it's grown on me.”

Lance grinned, and the butterflies calmed by a few degrees. “Me too. Oh! I know.” In a fit of genius, he pulled off his favorite blue watch, holding it out toward Keith. “This way you’ll always know what time it is! Then we can plan what time we're gonna meet up so we don't miss each other like that again.” He sat down all the way, letting his legs hang into the water so he could show Keith the device. “It's waterproof!” he glowed with pride.

“I don't get it,” Keith deadpanned, squinting at the watch. “What’s it do, exactly?”

“Well, you understand numbers right?” Lance began and Keith rolled his eyes before nodding. “These two hands circle around the numbers here. When the small one goes all the way around that’s half a day, and twice around marks a whole day.”

“But _why_ ,” Keith said, shrinking away from it subtly as Lance tried to pass it off.

“Because I’ll have one too,” Lance explained. This finally caught Keith's attention. “I have another watch at home I can put on. And when we're both wearing them, it's like we're synced, no matter where we are.”

“Oh. Cool,” Keith muttered under his breath, almost like he was flustered to admit he actually liked an idea of Lance's. “That's cool.” Lance snickered at Keith's inability to articulate proper gratitude and latched the watch onto Keith’s tentatively outstretched wrist. Once it was securely latched (he had to use the smallest setting on Keith’s thin wrists), he sat back to admire his handiwork. Keith shook his arm a little bit, testing the security of the new accessory; it wobbled, but stayed put. When he pushed his hand underwater and it remained unchanged, a small smile graced his face. “Cool,” he repeated, to himself this time, but then looked up at Lance and the smile brightened and oh no, the butterflies were back in full force, and they brought friends.

Put that on the back burner...

It took a solid hour of digging, later that night, but he finally found his red watch in Laura’s room. Apparently she’d kidnapped it to use as wall decor in the living room of her horror-themed dollhouse. Classic Laura.

Back in his room, he turned all the lights off and got under the covers before pulling the walkie talkie out from under his pillow. “Keith, come in,” he said into it, holding the button down. “Over.”

After a few seconds or so, his response came through, crackly and a little faint since it was coming through some rocks, but still there. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here. What.”

Lance rolled his eyes; he flat out refused to say ‘over’ no matter how many times Lance explained why it mattered. “I found my other watch,” he explained, pointing his flashlight at the watch face under the blankets. “I just wanted to make sure it’s synced properly with yours. What time does yours say?”

“Uhm… 9...and 23.”

“Got it,” Lance said, and adjusted the minute hand on his own watch back by three minutes. He wasn’t sure that was actually the right time, but it mattered more that they were synced than that they knew what time it was. “Now we’ll always know when to find each other. That way we don’t have to wait around forever if one of isn’t coming back soon. It’s perfect! Over.” Lance’s mind wandered as he happily imagined drawing up some kind of hangout schedule. The idea of Keith become a fixed feature in his life was tantalizing and thrilling and he never would’ve imagined how excited he’d be about it, considering how rockily their friendship had begun just one week ago.

“Hey, Lance?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” Keith said emphatically. It was the first time he’d expressed gratitude and it caught Lance off guard, so that when Keith continued he was left wholly dumbfounded. “I’m really glad we met. See you tomorrow,” he added quietly. “Over.”

“Yeah,” Lance replied, “me too,” and he totally forgot to say ‘over’ that time because he was too busy trying to figure out why his throat felt so dry.

He ended up falling asleep sometime soon after with his cheek resting on the cool face of his previously unworn red watch. He’d never really seen red as his color, which was why he’d always worn the blue one up until now.

But, for Keith, he was willing to give it a go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Please note that Lance's family in this is au as well bc (a) I've been working on this since before Lance even had a canon family, (b) I really like my fanon version of them and have had them close to my heart for 2 years ever since I wrote Aprovechar el Sol so I hope you love them too! This has been in the works literally since then because I took a trip to Santa Cruz halfway through writing it, and this idea happened haha.
> 
> 2) The SLRC in this story is fictional! I'm pretty sure they have something like that there but this one is made up and any correlation to any real association is purely accidental. I'm not trying to make any negative statement about existing organizations because uhhh anyone who's helping save the ocean gets a big thumbs up from me. thx <3


	2. Natural Bridges

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The kelp forest looks so surreal on the surface](https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5621/20675433181_129f96de9a_b.jpg)   
>  [But even more surreal underwater](http://www.uwphotographyguide.com/images/Articles/durand-20150725-1934v2.jpg)   
>  [One more](https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x1500_fit_center-center_80/Shutterstock_ChannelIslandsKelpCalifornia_web.jpg)   
>  [Natural Bridges State Beach](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Natural_Bridges_State_Park_%2816326279511%29.jpg/800px-Natural_Bridges_State_Park_%2816326279511%29.jpg)   
>  [More Natural Bridges State Beach](https://www.californiabeaches.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/bigstock-Natural-Bridges-Large-1000x661.jpg)
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> [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36nqGs_Dvws) is the song Lance plays in the beginning of this chapter. Night at the Opera is the best Queen album and you can’t change my mind! 
> 
> Buckle up lol, there is a reason I did not tag this #slow burn. I don't marinade in pining, I douse myself in it and then set myself on fire :)

The blue watch was just the beginning of the many things Lance would give to Keith over the years. If there was one thing Lance learned about Keith faster than anything else in that first golden summer, it was that he loved land things just as much as Lance loved ocean things. At first he refused to ask for anything specific, but that was fine because Lance found it was almost impossible to disappoint him. Whatever new toy or activity Lance brought to the grotto, Keith would be as enamored with its sheer existence as Lance was with the stories Keith shared from his adventures out in the bay as his tail finished healing. Like a moth to a flame.

(Coincidentally—hilariously—Keith loved fire more than anything else Lance had to offer.)

Lance didn’t really get his fascination with human stuff, but whenever he said so Keith would reply in turn that _he_ didn’t get why Lance liked the water so much when he couldn’t even breathe there.

Touché, Keith.

So they were kind of at an impasse. It was frustrating at times, trying to find some kind of middle ground when all Lance wanted to talk about was the ocean and all Keith wanted to talk about was everything outside it. But (through a lot of bickering, arguing, trial, and error) they learned how to be friends. Even though music was probably the topic they agreed on the least of all, it was perhaps the thing they spent the most time on through that first summer. Strangely enough, music was the thing that really bridged the gap and cemented them as friends. There was almost never a day that passed by that summer where Lance didn’t have some new song to show him when he came by the grotto, and where Keith didn’t steal Lance’s phone afterward and to change it to something “much better than that dumb garbage—”

—at which point things would more often than not devolve into a physical altercation.

Look, Lance was trying, okay, but sometimes Keith was just dead wrong!!!

“I will literally end you if you ever call Queen garbage to my face again,” he threatened, pausing his raucous dancing in order to lunge for his phone where it rested on the ledge, lifting it up out of reach as Keith also made a lunge for it, sending a spray of water up from the lake onto the ledge and soaking Lance’s otherwise-dry swim trunks. “What is your damage with fun music?” he laughed as Keith slipped back into the water in defeat like some kind of thwarted predator.

“It’s not fun,” Keith grumbled, “it’s boring. Put on that band you showed me yesterday—”

Lance threw his hands up. “You mean the one I showed you as a joke when I was literally making fun of your taste in music?!”

Keith glared up at him. “Shut up, you liked it too or it wouldn’t have been saved on your dumb phone.”

“You know what?” Lance said, turning away from Keith and pointedly bouncing to the absolute bop that was still playing from his phone, “I’m gonna put this album on repeat and superglue my phone to the ceiling so you’re forced to learn how to appreciate it.” As far as Lance was concerned, anyone who didn't like Bohemian Rhapsody belonged in jail.

“That’s a great way to get me to go find somewhere else to hang out.”

At that Lance had to glance over his shoulder, and it was then that he noticed how truly bothered Keith looked. It was more than his usual surface level grumpiness; he was doing that thing where he only kept his eyes above water, making him look less like a mysterious sea creature and more like the angsty, sulking, broody ten year old that Lance had come to know him as this summer.

“Dude, you really need to lighten up,” Lance told him. “Not every song has to be deep and sad, you know? Sometimes they’re just for dancing.”

“That’d explain why I don’t like them then.”

“Buzzkill alert,” Lance joked, his voice echoing on the grotto walls as he cupped his hands and called out to nobody, “Keith hates dancing—”

“I don’t—” Keith cut himself off with a frustrated snarl, and blew a flurry of bubbles underwater before pulling up to speak again. “I don’t hate dancing, you moron, I just can’t! Obviously. And it’s not fun to just _watch_ you have fun when I can’t join in.”

Lance froze halfway through a mocking moonwalk. “Oh.” Guilt pricked at him; he genuinely did not see this twist coming. “I mean, what’s stopping you? I feel like dancing underwater would be way funner than dancing up on these cold rocks. Just saying.”

Keith pouted, shaking his head. “Can’t hear the music down there.”

“That’s it?! Why didn’t you just say so?” Struck by genius, Lance went over to the corner where he had his duffel bag of emergency hangout supplies he’d squirreled away over the last two months. After a minute of digging, he found the half-empty box of Ziploc bags shoved at the bottom under a bag of squished energy bars. He put on Seaside Rendezvous (like okay, Bohemian Rhapsody was amazing, but this one was the most underrated song on this album and by far the most fun to dance to). As he pressed play and the happy-go-lucky song promptly became muffled inside three layers of thin plastic, Keith watched him intently from the water, eyebrows furrowed deep and furrowing even deeper when Lance finished zipping the last bag shut and skipped over to the water’s edge. “Check it out!” Lance said, and plunged his phone underwater.

Instantly the song halved in volume, and Keith’s face lit up in response. Without a second thought, he ducked underwater, and Lance watched his earfins twitch, easily catching the filtered sunlight since they were so near the surface. It was hard to tell whether he was enjoying it or not through the choppy surface of the water, but it looked like... maybe… Yes! Lance’s laughter filled the grotto as Keith came to life all at once and spun around in a circle—scratch that, three circles—his white fins billowing out around him, turning him into a whirling spiral of indiscernible features. Never in a million years would he admit this to Keith, but it was cute. He hadn’t even finished laughing at Keith’s reaction before a hand seized his wrist where he was currently holding his phone below the surface. He’d barely had time to suck in a surprised breath before Keith had hauled him face-first off the ledge and into the freezing water. The bag with his phone in it slipped from his grasp and sank, presumably, to the bottom of the lake, but he couldn’t see it because he was squeezing his eyes shut to keep the freezing saltwater out. _This_ wasn't cute at all. It was messy and disorienting and he couldn’t even tell which direction he was facing because Keith was all around him, hands on his wrists, spiraling them down in endless dizzying circles, and... and the sound of his laughter fell soft and bubbly on Lance’s ears as it filtered through the water, mingling with the surreal lighthearted pulse of the music. He stopped struggling, trusting wholeheartedly that Keith would bring him to the surface before his lungs started to hurt, and just listened.

That? That right there? The rare sound Keith made when he was utterly, unabashedly happy? That swiftly became Lance’s favorite song in the entire universe.

(Again… not that he would ever in a million years admit that to Keith.)

Later that night Lance tapped his pencil against his lip as he stared down at the list he kept hidden inside the jar at home where he saved his allowance every week. After a moment of thought, he wrote down a new item at the very top above the ones he'd already crossed off, underlining it for extra emphasis. This was something of a wishlist, considering it'd take him months to save up enough allowance for all of this stuff, not to mention the pickle of how to get the larger ticket items down the cliff by himself without dropping them, falling off, or being seen. But he was willing to do extra chores if that's what it took, because once Lance had his heart set on something, neither Heaven or Earth could sway him.

 

 

_FOR THE GROTTO:_

 

_ waterproof bluetooth speakers _

_~~bag of emergency hangout stuff~~ _

_~~plastic tub to put his food in~~ _

_~~blankets~~ _

_beanbag chairs (plastic, def not fabric)_

_table (folding)_

_some kind of shelf for his stuff (blocks + boards?)_

_more lights_

_-string lights (battery powered)_

_-pool lights for the lake? ask Hunk's dad about theirs_

_more candles lol_

_more books_

 

 

As weeks turned to months and a whole year came and went, many things would get crossed off his list and replaced with new things, but not _‘more books_.’ That was the one list item that always stayed.

See, he wasn’t one to reread things anyway, and Keith usually raved about the books Lance lent him for hours once he finished reading them and got sad if Lance took them back, so he ended up just leaving them down there one by one. He could stand to part with anything when it made Keith’s face light up like that. Keith was fun when he was ranting. It was only a few months before this had evolved into Lance bringing him an entire backpack full of books once a week or so.

Keith was a fast reader. When Lance ran out of comic books and adventure novels to lend him, he approached Mamá in the kitchen one day and asked her to help sign him up for a library card. He felt guilty about how happy this made her, considering he wouldn’t be reading the books himself at all, but not too guilty. It wasn’t too long after he started shopping the library for stuff Keith would like (science fiction turned out to be a particular weakness of his; he quickly forgot about Harry Potter in favor of Star Wars) that Lance started sharing his school textbooks with Keith too, and printing out extra copies of his homework. At first he just thought it'd be funny watching Keith try to do math, but it became something else rather quickly. Lance passed math with an A for the first time ever in the first quarter of seventh grade, because Keith was stupidly good at math apparently.

The longer they knew each other, the more Lance gave him. The grotto filled up with lights and decorations and blankets and throw pillows. He came here so often he started leaving spare changes of clothes and a few pairs of swim trunks which he would cycle through, and his extra wetsuit for when they wanted to go on field trips out into the harbor together. He began to leave his tablet overnight too, loaded with documentaries and TV shows and articles, charging it every other day. As much as Keith pretended he didn’t care about this “school stuff,” Lance knew that he did because he soaked it all up anyway. Pretty soon it seemed like Keith was smarter than he was.

Which was moderately infuriating.

But, somehow, Keith made up for it by sharing daily stories about his underwater adventures until Lance felt like he knew more about the ocean than any other human in the world. On the rare weekends when the family got up early to load up on the family boat and go sailing together, it was an exercise in self-restraint not to shout out everything he knew that he shouldn't know about what lay in hiding at the seafloor, like the deep crevice filled with eels, the tangle of kelp so big it trapped a shark once, the decaying whale skeleton offshore of the old battleship.

But it wasn't all cool stuff, down there.

Keith liked to bring back pretty trash that he found in the harbor. (Although he bristled angrily whenever Lance called it “trash” out loud.) These things intrigued him, being so different from everything else in the water; he always wanted to know what kind of human contraption these things used to be or used to be part of. What they used to do, who used them and why. So Lance would humor him and explain (“mirror, toy, broken spatula…”), or he would do his best to guess (“uh.. it’s some kind of.. spirally.. thingy”), and then he would try and get Keith to let him dispose of them properly and Keith would hiss at him and hide them down at the bottom of his lake, proclaiming the latest piece of trash as His and warning Lance not to touch it, “or else.”

Keith thought he was sooo scary.

He wasn't, though, and when Keith said things like “or else” Lance could only snort in response. No amount of hissing and threatening and brandishing his mysterious knife could intimidate Lance when he'd also seen Keith at his softest. Not when he knew was it was like to stretch out side by side with him on the open rocks outside in the late night low tide, stargazing and plane-spotting while Keith told Lance what else he’d gotten up to that day out in the expansive kelp forest beyond the shallow shorelines of Santa Cruz. Where he’d gone, what kind of creatures he’d seen, what the mysterious landscape of the ocean floor looked like, how it felt to go swimming through kelps as tall as Redwoods with shadow creatures and glitter-scaled swarms. Keith liked to try and figure out which fish was leading the way in the schools that roamed the bay, and it drove him _crazy_ because it seemed there never was one. Lance would pester him with questions until he could see it all in HD in his own head, pairing the scientific names to the descriptions Keith gave him of the plants and animals, and more often than not, Keith would laugh and say, “It’s really not all that great.”

Which pissed Lance off, because it wasn’t fair that Keith got to go exploring in the ocean when Lance couldn’t, and Keith didn’t even appreciate it. The injustice! “That’s just what you think because you get to see it all the time,” Lance huffed one night.

“I’m serious, Lance, it’s not like those pictures of the ocean around Cuba that you showed me. There are no endless plains of rainbow reefs here. It’s... dark. The colors are mostly muted. Murky greens and browns and blues, even the wildlife.”

“Except for you,” Lance pointed out.

“Yeah,” Keith sighed, his bright red tail flapping against the rock, pearlescent fins fanned out every which way, sending a spray of water at Lance’s bare legs. “Except me. But then, I’m not native to this area. So I don’t really belong here, do I?”

Lance chose not to answer that.

He was afraid to laugh it off and say _no, I guess not,_ to lighten the mood, on the off chance Keith took him seriously and decided to finally move on from here. After all, he’d been transient since his dad died—until that day when he cut his tail and stumbled upon Lance. The fact that he’d stayed here for so long after healing (two years now!) was nothing short of baffling based on everything else he knew about Keith, and testing the fragile spell that kept Keith lingering here felt like sticking his hand into a fire when Lance would rather stay unburned.

But for some reason, the thought of getting real with Keith, the prospect of dropping the playful banter for a second and saying, _well I’m not native to this city either, but I belong here and so do you…_

That was scarier than anything Keith could ever say or do.

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

It was when Lance was in eighth grade that Keith started giving back.

The first time Keith brought him a seashell Lance genuinely thought he was being made fun of somehow. He didn’t know how, but  _somehow_. When Keith threw his wet satchel on their favorite ledge and dug the shell out in silence, offering it up without so much as a single word of explanation (right in the middle of a frankly riveting story Lance was telling about this hot new girl at school named Nyma who duct taped his wrists to a telephone pole today while her twin brother hid his backpack in a location he still hadn’t found yet), Lance went silent too. This was some new level of Keith-banter that he hadn’t unlocked a comeback strategy for yet. Some fresh form of sass. Right? Why the hell else would Keith be holding a spiny red seashell out toward him like some kind of present or something, completely out of the blue?

Keith’s arm drooped as Lance continued to draw a blank. “I, uh,” he said, “I found it down in Monterey last week. I thought you’d like it. If you don’t want it I can just throw it out.”

He started to sink back into the water with it, but Lance lunged forward and snatched it from Keith’s hand. He was a little bit in shock but he managed to stifle his laughter. “Wait, I do want it! It’s really cool, dude, I never find shells this huge and unbroken on the shore. Do you see ones like this a lot?”

“Sometimes. I’m not usually looking for them.”

“‘Cause I collect seashells,” Lance rushed, “so if you ever see another one...”

“I could keep an eye out,” Keith teased. “I guess. And… and maybe put this sharp one in your backpack. Nobody will steal it from you ever again if they get stabbed in the hand when they try.”

“Oh my god. I’m not boobytrapping my backpack.”

“If you’d just carry a knife—”

“Keith, for the last time, I can’t take an eight inch dagger to school!”

Keith glowered. “But you need protection, obviously.”

A little laugh huffed its way out of Lance’s chest. “It was just a prank, Keith. Harmless.”

“You have marks on your wrists.”

Did he? He inspected them with growing embarrassment. It was true, but that made sense considering he'd kinda rubbed them raw by trying to wriggle out of it, and it had hurt like a bitch when Hunk and Pidge found him there and peeled it all off. Plus, it had taken him a solid two hours to clean all the gunk off his watch that the duct tape left behind. But Lance only shrugged, moving his arms behind him and clearing his throat, feeling vulnerable and exposed and oddly lightheaded at the way Keith was looking at him. At the intensity in his eyes. The way his earfins angled backward and down, like a cat gearing up to pounce. Keith was such an intense guy that sometimes Lance just didn’t know what to do with it.

Luckily, Keith allowed him to change the subject after that without pushing it any farther. But he didn’t forget the conversation, because from then on Lance’s bedroom at home slowly began to fill with echoes of the ocean. A spiny red seashell from Monterey Bay. A weird piece of driftwood that the current had shaped to look like the crescent moon. A small knife painstakingly carved from whalebone, which Keith handed over wrapped in a layer of seaweed the first time they took a risk and met up somewhere far away from the safety of their homebase.

Hidden Beach was tiny, wrapped on three sides by steep cliffs that went straight from the woodsy edge of a neighborhood down to the beach sand. This beach had always been his favorite because it was so small it wasn’t even named on Google Maps, and it was literally hidden from view unless you knew it was there already. Visitors were few, tourists were rare, and the sand was usually carpeted with millions of the tiniest smooth seashells so that you couldn’t take a single step without them coming up between your toes like pebbles. It was the coziest beach in the city. It was the only one he could think of where Keith could lay out on the sand with him, provided they went at night. So they planned it for weeks, scouting out the hours of the night and days of the week when it was most likely to be deserted, and at midnight on the day of Lance pulled his converse on as silently as he could, tucked some pillows under his blanket to make it seem like he was still under there, and made the long trek on foot.

There was something different about laying out on the sand with Keith than hanging out inside the grotto. Scary-different. It was almost like he belonged on this side of the water, and that when Lance eventually got up to go home for the night, Keith would rise too, and climb back up those rickety wooden stairs with him. It was scary how much more he wanted that when it was 4am and he was too tired to pretend he didn’t.

When eventually he did stand up to leave, Keith caught him by the hand, and in lieu of answering Lance’s questioning gaze, he reached into his old brown satchel—so much fuller now than it was when they’d met—and pulled out the whalebone knife. He pressed it into Lance’s hand without so much as a single word of explanation, then rolled over into the black shallows and darted away before Lance had even untangled it from the seaweed wrapping. He was left there alone to turn the small, smooth object over in his hands in awe, almost nicking himself as he discovered how it unfolded along an imperfect hinge to reveal a razor-sharp edge. He tried and failed not to giggle as he ran his thumb over the words _'you'll know when to use me'_ where they were etched in shallow strokes along the handle, wondering how long it took Keith to carve this, wondering if he'd had that cute pout on his face when he was doing it, wondering if he'd started the project right after Lance told him about Nyma and Rolo.

Lance was not a violent person, and he knew he'd probably never use this. But it was the thought that counted, and the idea that Keith thought about him enough to do something like this for him set an unfamiliar heat creeping into his stomach, slow and steady, a lava flow he couldn't back away from. It was flattering. Lance was flattered, and surprised, and honestly kind of enamored, so he refolded the knife, pocketed it, and carried it pretty much everywhere he went after that.

Looking back, this was probably the tipping point. The event horizon. The moment when a growing wave first crests and foams white and starts the tumultuous process of falling, trading ownership, moon to earth, giving itself over—

One gravitational worship for another.

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

The problem was that the more time he spent with Keith, the more everyone bugged him about it.

Seriously, _everyone_ , and all the time too. It was like they had secret meetings where they all sat down and agreed on it or something. Community directive: Bug Lance About Sports and Clubs And Why He’s Not Doing Any.

It was one of the hardest parts about Keith, and being Keith's friend, and keeping the time he spent with Keith a secret from his friends and family and classmates and teachers. _You’re so athletic and so very smart,_ they would say, (okay maybe not exaaactly like that, but that was the gist and it got old fast). Nobody understood why he flatly refused to join up with any extracurriculars, and it’s not like he could be honest about his true motive. They would pester him about it, ganging up sometimes (looking at you Mamá and Papá), and he would have to just smile and handwave and remind them that he was a simple guy with simple wants, and those wants were to swim and surf.

Though, to be honest, he kinda wished he could try out for basketball. Over the summer between eighth and ninth grade he shot up like four more inches, and he really thought he could do well in it judging by his three-pointer record down at the park with the other neighborhood kids. But, that was a five day a week two and a half hours a day commitment, and that was basically all his daylight Keith hours for a whole semester, so yeah. Pass on that. Hard pass. _Even though_ Nyma pointedly said she had a thing for basketball players with a wink while Lance was gazing longingly at the tryout sign-ups posted in the cafeteria. Even though they had kissed at Homecoming and he was kinda maybe hoping for another. So basketball was a more difficult pass than most, but a pass nonetheless.

The family poked endless fun at him for his behavior. Began to say things like, “Sorry Hunk, Lance can’t come to the phone, he’s off communing with the sand crabs again—oi, okay I’m just kidding, here he is, ouch Lance _get off me_ —”

(Benito. The little gremlin, always stealing his phone.)

Or, “ _There_ you are Leandro, back from your date with Cthulhu? It’s almost 2am, do you realize that? You’re lucky Mamá and Papá went to bed early. I can’t keep covering your ass like this...”

(Marco. Bless him for continuing to cover Lance’s ass on the regular despite insisting “This is the last time” every single time.)

Or, “You _would_ get your first job at the Wharf. I totally called it. Is it so you can just jump straight over the rail into the ocean when your shift at the tacky gift shop is over? Do they let you work in your wetsuit? Isn't that thing glued to your skin?”

(Gabriela. So full of salt and sass for someone who was only ten. This was the life of the youngest child, Lance supposed; all that leftover Lacoste-McClain sass had to end up somewhere.)

Or, perhaps worst of all, simply, “He’s in love with the ocean.”

(Laura. She just had to say it with that teasing tone and that knowing gleam in her eye, like what she actually suspected was that Lance had some kind of secret girlfriend or something.)

Thank you, Laura. Because that was the one that stuck, obviously.

Every time his family pulled that line his responding blush worsened until he was worried they were starting to really believe it. So he shoved a lid on his slowly boiling embarrassment while his family had their harmless laugh at the hundreds of seashells in jars all over his room. They didn’t even know about the things hidden under his bed he wouldn’t be able to explain away—like the fossilized ammonite (“Do you have any idea how fucking cool this is?!” he had screeched at Keith for a full hour when he came back from his San Francisco trip with the heavy stone weighing down his satchel), or the angler fish skeleton Lance had attempted to preserve with painted-on polyurethane (he still wanted to know why the hell Keith had been that far beyond the drop-off, but was also dying to know what else was lurking down there), or the paper bag filled to the brim with shark teeth (which Keith swore up and down he was simply ‘finding,’ but Lance wasn’t even remotely convinced when he looked that proud of himself every time he came home with a new one).

As Lance got taller, shoulders broadening, Keith grew in other ways. His side fins got longer, as did the dorsal ones running down his lower back and converging in overlapping ‘V’s down the back of his tail, and started to look like pure liquid silver where they rippled just below the surface. These extra tiny scales grew in tight lines down his sides and in zig-zagging hatches near the tips of his fins, and were almost mistakable for diamonds when the sunlight hit them just right. They seemed to serve no purpose at all other than to up Keith’s ‘ethereal’ score by another ten points.

Like, as if he wasn’t ethereal enough already, right? Ugh.

God, it was almost impossible not to stare at him sometimes. It drove Lance up the wall. Honestly, he probably _was_ out fighting sharks just to get shark teeth Lance didn’t really need. It was probably a cakewalk for him, because how the hell was a poor unsuspecting shark supposed to focus on the fight when Keith was out here looking like... _that_.

They didn’t know much about mer in general beyond what Keith remembered from his early years with his dad, who had come to North American waters from across the Pacific after being been born somewhere in or around the Sea of Japan. Or so they guessed based on the world map and his dad's old stories. But his dad had grown up alone and crossed the ocean alone. There was no one on his dad's side to even look for, as far as he knew. And even if he could, Keith was apparently a _lot_ different from his dad physically because his mom was a different race of mer, and he didn’t even remember her, let alone where she came from or what she looked like. So, since Keith looked nothing like his dad had, every little of growth spurt Keith went through was something of a surprise to the both of them. Who knew how long these fins were gonna get? Not Keith. Who knew what those strangely soft new diamond scales were for? Not Lance. It became an inside joke between the two of them. Easier to laugh it off and joke about it than to dwell on the fact that Keith had nobody like himself that he could possibly ask about it.

 _That_ was a subject they both liked to avoid, albeit for different reasons.

Even Keith’s voice changed, same as Lance’s, deepening into something richer and smoother as he got older, with an impassioned cadence to it that sometimes had Lance’s stomach flipping over on itself. Sometimes he wondered if maybe Keith wasn’t a mer at all, but some kind of siren instead. An echo of old sailors’ tales, those beautiful creatures of legend that lured in their prey with gemstone eyes and voices like honeyed vanilla, dragging them down through slivers of reflected moonlight. Maybe all these changes were just Keith growing into his siren-shoes. Maybe someday soon Lance would come down here to their grotto and Keith would catch him unawares, hum him some eerie ocean song, wrap his arms around Lance while he was distracted by the spell, and drag him under for good.

And maybe this hypothetical _‘Keith turns out to be a siren_ ’ thing was just something he’d cooked up to cope with the fact that farther from the ocean Lance strayed the more he felt it calling him to come back, and the fact that he couldn’t stop staring at Keith when Keith wasn’t looking, and the fact that he lied awake at night thinking about him sometimes. But the weird thing that was that when Lance imagined what that would be like, if Keith did turn out to be a siren, all he could think about was just letting it happen. Letting go. Letting himself be taken under. It didn’t scare him at all.

Oh.

And there was one more itty bitty thing that people bugged Lance about, which he didn’t really have time in the day for and yet could never find a proper excuse not to have, considering his blindingly obvious interest in the subject matter.

(“Find a girl who’s into your bad flirting yet, Lance?”

“Shut up, Marco.”)

(“Mijo, when are you going to bring home a pretty girl for me to dote on?”

“Mamá, please..”)

(“Hey so are you and Nyma like, dating, or…”

“Why don’t you ask Nyma, Rolo, I’m pretty sure she can speak for herself.”)

Ah, Nyma. He had no friggin' clue what they were supposed to be to each other. Yeah, they’d kissed once at Homecoming sophomore year, and twice more since then. And yeah, he liked her. Moreover, he liked kissing her. But… but he didn’t just want someone to kiss sometimes, you know? Lance wanted something real. He craved the real deal deeply, restlessly, with his entire being. He was a guy who was in love with love. He wanted to be someone's everything, not just their sometimes. But Nyma always dodged his questions and pulled away when he hinted he wanted more in life than just a makeout buddy.

Until one day in the fall of junior year.

It was the middle of August, and it was also the first time he’d seen her since halfway through the summer vacation. They spent the first half of the class period loosely flirting at each other like old times, so maybe he shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when she took the first available opportunity to tug him behind the bleachers during gym while everyone was off the field getting water. But he was—surprised, that is—and therefore sidestepped her attempt to kiss him, stammering out a question instead. What exactly did she even want from him? Because honestly, he was friggin’ confused.

She huffed and puffed a bit at being called out directly, until finally coming out with it. “Look, I do like you, okay? But you’re never _around_. I don’t want a boyfriend I can never get ahold of. You can understand that, right? You’re cute, but not that cute.”

“Okay, well.” He stepped back out of the shade into the sunlight, feeling oddly relieved by the realization that she wasn’t looking for anything serious from him. Did that mean he didn’t want anything serious after all? Or that he just didn’t want it with her? Or was he just relieved because having a girlfriend was time-consuming and he’d always been a little afraid of what that might mean when it came to Keith? “I guess that’s it then, huh?”

She opened her mouth at him in shock, her twin braids flopping against her shoulders as her hands flew to her hips. “You could have just— You’re supposed to be like, ‘I’ll come around more often then,’ or something!”

“But I can’t.”

“Why not? What the hell do you even do after school? You never hang out with anyone anymore besides Hunk and Pidge. If you don’t wanna hang out with us, then just say so.”

“That’s not it at all,” Lance blurted out of panicked guilt, “it’s just, there’s someone that I—” Sensing that he was walking himself walking into a trap here, he cut himself off. But as he watched the rest of his unfinished sentence puzzle itself out on her face, he blushed deeply, all the way down his neck. In retrospect, blurting that out was probably a dick move. It’s not like he phrased it that way on purpose, though. He just.. he slipped.

Shock had her frozen with her hands still on her hips. Behind her, the gym teacher was yelling for everyone to get back out on the field, but neither of them moved an inch. “Well, you could’ve just said you were seeing someone,” she finally responded, every syllable painted with something between surprise and annoyance. “I get it. That’s why you wanted to know whether I wanted to be serious or not.”

Lance felt caught, even though it wasn’t true. Well, not technically. Not the way that she meant it, anyway.

“Well I don’t,” she finished. “Not as long as you’re more interested in someone else than me, anyway. No wonder you’re never around.”

“I— yeah,” he relented sheepishly. There was no easy way of talking himself out of that one. Not with the gym teacher shouting “ _Nyma! Lance!”_ in the distance and Nyma looking at him like she would see straight through whatever he said next. “We’re still friends though, right?”

“What? Duh,” she laughed, punching him on the shoulder as she jogged past him into the glaring noon light. “Let’s just not make out anymore, okay?”

“Okay,” he laughed, “deal,” and followed her back out to the field, and he really tried hard to put the whole interaction out of his mind and not waste brainpower analyzing why he felt such comforting solace at the prospect of being freshly untethered, but he ended up taking a soccer ball to the back of the head anyway.

He was still rubbing the spot in an attempt to ease his headache when he slipped into the family’s regular booth at the Luna Cafe.

“Let me guess,” Rhonnie hummed, leaning one elbow on the booth above to him in lieu of setting down the menu in her hand. “Two coffees with enough sugar between them to kill an elephant, one with milk and one without, to go.”

“You know me so well,” Lance laughed, already digging out his wallet. “Thanks, Rhonnie.”

His headache ebbed beneath the calming cadence of cafe chatter, and he closed his eyes, listening to Rhonnie bustle around behind the bar making him a fresh pot of coffee. She always brewed him a fresh one even though he insisted it wasn’t necessary. Soon enough there were two soft clunks on the table, and he opened his eyes to find Rhonnie setting the two coffees down in front of him. “Am I ever gonna meet this mystery number two?” she prodded. “You should bring ‘er around for a date sometime. It’s been forever since you brought a girl here. I wanna meet this new one, Lance, this mystery girl you’ve spent half yer paychecks buying coffee for.”

“Oh. Uh..” He blinked down at the two cardboard coffee cups, one of which said _Leandro_ in big loopy font (she always wrote down his given name even though she was usually too embarrassed to say it aloud in her white southern drawl, and he loved that). The second cup had a big heart drawn on it instead of a name, with a question mark inside. Uh-oh. “It’s not a girl,” he said, feeling like that misunderstanding needed to be rectified immediately before Rhonnie talked to his family and confirmed their belief that he had a secret girlfriend.

“I see,” Rhonnie said slowly. “That’s okay too.” Confused by her tone, he looked up at her, only to find her hand ruffling his hair with affection. “You should bring _him_ here sometime, then.”

Lance’s mouth fell agape as he registered the new misunderstanding. Heat rose up his neck, blossoming on his cheeks as the image Rhonnie was implying came into his mind unasked for and wildly unprepared for. It was so vivid, the thought of Keith, _here_ , sitting across from him in this booth the way Nyma had last year before Homecoming, and Kendra those few times in ninth grade, and Isabel in eighth. Keith laughing and sipping coffee out of a ceramic mug that said Luna Cafe instead of a disposable one, wearing a comfy autumn jacket, kicking Lance under the table with his shoes instead of slapping him with his tail. The thought of Keith actually _being_ here, the thought of Keith existing next to Lance and occupying a space in his life beyond the thin strip where land touched ocean—it was an overwhelming concept, and for some reason it hit him much, much harder than usual.

“Yeah right,” he muttered, crossing his forearms on the table and letting his forehead fall onto them pathetically. “I wish.”

“Oh, honey,” Rhonnie cooed, and pushed herself into the booth beside him, bringing her arm down around his shoulders. “What’s stopping you?”

“Literally everything,” he sighed, and Rhonnie was kind enough to let it lie.

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

“Have fun with your lover!” Laura called out as Lance finished changing into his wetsuit and pouring the two coffees into twin thermoses and tucking them into the backpack he’d gone inside the house to grab so he didn’t spill them as he climbed down to the grotto. Meaning by ‘lover’ ‘the ocean’ of course. “Tell them I said hello!” she added as he made a break for the front door.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lance grumbled, and stepped into the brisk autumn air.

He wasn’t in the mood for the ocean-as-lover jokes today. He was feeling weird. Bad-weird. _Sad_ -weird. And not about Nyma. As he headed for the cliffside (waiting a few minutes until there were no cars in either direction to swing over to the other side, as usual) his head still ached. He liked to think it was from that excellently misplaced soccer kick, but he knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t a physical ache, really. It was a lot deeper than that. He was so distracted by it that he walked right into that buff jogger who ran past his house every day. He apologized profusely (although the guy seemed mostly concerned about Lance's wellbeing anyway) and then waited for the jogger to run off again before going on over the side of the cliff.

Lance had given a lot of things to Keith over the last six years. As he climbed down into the grotto today he looked around at the changes they’d made to it together since that summer before sixth grade, and really mulled over what it all meant. There was the shelf at the far end (cinder blocks and wood boards spray painted black) stacked with books and paper and games and other human trinkets Lance thought Keith would like. Sometimes he’d guessed right (hello fun competitive streak for Battleship), other times horribly wrong (hello complete lack of patience for the 5000 piece puzzle). There was also a Rubix cube, three jars of colored pens, a stack of notebooks, a piggy bank stuffed with sand dollars that Lance had put in as a joke and couldn’t get back out again, a ukulele they were both trying to learn how to play, a box overflowing with various fidget toys, and a plethora of both taper and jar candles in various stages of life and death.

Keith was borderline obsessed with fire, which was possibly Lance’s number one favorite thing about him. It was so… human.

There were a lot of things about him that were surprisingly human, and the hominess of this cave (which was once so cold and empty and dark) was the most human thing of them all.

Just, everything about it. The framed pictures shoved into random crevices in the walls, mostly of places on Earth Lance had been, to which Keith couldn’t go but loved to hear about. The little battery powered string lights lining the edges of the room, low enough for Keith to reach, far enough from the water to keep them dry. The pool lights Lance had saved up for and helped Keith install underwater. The crazy renovations Keith had done under there to make it comfortable and liveable: the cute seaweed bed, his cuter pet anemones (" _They’re not pets just because I feed them sometimes”_ ), and the illegally cute driftwood door he kept lodged in the grotto’s underwater entrance to keep the crabs out. The plastic bean bag chairs shoved into the coziest corner next to the blankets and pillows that Lance had to take to the laundromat whenever he wanted to wash the musty sea salt smell out, to avoid raising suspicions at home. The plastic fold-out table beside the water’s edge, constantly covered in teenage clutter, permanently set for two, with its twin plastic chairs facing each other. Keith was lithe and strong enough now that he could pull himself up into his own chair without any help at all.

That’s where he was when Lance entered the grotto today.

Lance took the chair opposite Keith silently, opting not to shove the book out of his hand like he normally would when Keith didn’t immediately drop everything to greet his needy ass, instead just sliding his coffee toward him. He must be at a good part in the book or something because he opened it without looking up yet or even saying hi and took a long swig. It was always a little weird, sitting like this at a table with him. Almost like they were normal friends. Almost like this table could be anywhere, and they could be anyone...

Sighing to himself, Lance let his cheek come to rest on the cold surface of the table. He was bummed about Nyma and felt somewhat rejected, but like… not nearly enough, and that was what had him feeling torn up like this. Because he kind of rejected _her_ , didn’t he? He could have reacted differently to her words. He could’ve told her he’d come around the larger friend group more often and make more time for her specifically, and he could very well have gotten a girlfriend out of it. So why didn’t he say that? Why didn’t he do it?

Easy. Because it would’ve meant taking away from Keith time, and he wasn’t even remotely into that. If it was really down to a crappy ultimatum, then screw having a girlfriend. Nothing against Nyma, but he’d known Keith way longer than her, and he preferred Keith’s company.

But…

What did that _mean?_ What about the future when he got a girlfriend for real? What if he got married and had kids? What about when he went off to college in two years? He couldn’t go to any college out of town when Keith was here—he couldn’t just leave him, could he? No, the idea made him sick to his stomach in a way the thing with Nyma hadn’t. Leaving Nyma or any other random future girl for college would be sad, but in the end, doable. He was pretty sure he could do it.

Leaving _Keith?_

The words alone twisted his insides, like a live thing with a malicious agenda, like they could physically harm him just by existing as a hypothetical thing that might happen someday. It hit him hard, the realization that he wouldn't be able to do it when the time came. That he was on a set path already, and that when he graduated high school in two years he was going to bend over backwards and arrange his life around Keith, even if it meant he had to turn down full-ride scholarships, even if it meant forgoing a family of his own, even if it meant staying here in this little corner of Earth for the rest of his natural life.

 _Oh my god_. It was the radical juxtaposition of these two concepts, a future with Keith versus a future without him, that made Lance finally see this feeling for what it was. _Oh my_ _god, I’m_ _pining_.

He could talk himself around it all he wanted, but in the end, it didn’t matter how he labeled it. That's what this was.

He was lovesick.

No sooner had he thought those words than Keith broke the silence. “You okay?”

Startled out of his reverie, Lance shot upright from his position slouched over the table, seeing that Keith’s book had been placed on the table between them and he was now leaning on one hand, eyeing Lance thoughtfully. “Oh, uh... Yeah. Nyma and I broke it off for good this morning. I mean we were never really dating in the first place but yeah, it’s for sure not gonna happen now.”

Keith’s face was carefully blank. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay,” he said with sincerity. “She wanted me to spend more time with her and I just.. I dunno.” Here he looked away down into the glassy water again, feeling exposed for his reasoning. “I didn’t want to.”

“Oh.” There was a long moment of silence, and then, “Lance, am I getting in the way—”

“What? No. Keith, no.”

“Listen, I’m not a kid anymore, I can handle being alone.”

“I’m not— Keith!” He leaned over the table earnestly, hating the closed-off expression on Keith’s face. “I don’t come here because I think you need me to, okay, it’s not like that. I come here every day because I— You’re my best friend. I like you way more than I like Nyma, okay? I’m not about to ditch you for her. Or for anyone else.”

Oof. That was a little much, maybe. He had to look away right after because of the way Keith was looking back at him. Like he knew exactly what Lance meant, even though Lance himself wasn’t sure of it yet.

“Hey,” Keith said softly, and Lance almost jumped clean out of his skin as Keith’s fingers ghosted along the back of his hand. He stared at Keith’s hand somewhat in shock, because Keith never touched _anything_ that gently, seriously, he’d seen Keith smash crabs and debone fish with his bare hands and it was horrifying. “Let's do something fun,” Keith said, and all at once the gentle touch became Keith’s hand wrapped around Lance’s wrist in a vice grip, and then Lance was being yanked arm-first straight into the water as Keith dove off his seat in a clean arc.

The water wasn’t that cold through his half wetsuit, but Lance yelped anyway as his chair crashed into the water with him and wobbled its way to the bottom when Lance kicked it away. Keith laughed as Lance surfaced again beside him, spitting water and glaring. “Okay, you fucking siren! Jesus, give a guy some warning!”

“But then I wouldn’t have gotten to hear you make that hilarious sound you just made,” Keith deadpanned. “Now hold your breath.”

And his grip moved slyly from Lance’s wrist to a full wrap around his torso, so quickly that Lance didn’t have any time to wiggle away, which, given his recent revelation, came as a total shock to his system. They didn’t do this. Not like _this_. When they wanted to spend time outside the grotto Lance would climb out topside and then climb down on his own to meet Keith somewhere between the rocks. They’d never done it this way before.

Yet here they were. Here was Keith tightening his grip, waiting on Lance, who wasn’t sure which thing was putting the adrenaline in his veins, the looming prospect of going through a winding dark underwater tunnel that he could drown in within minutes without Keith’s guiding hand, or the weight of Keith’s confidence as he enveloped Lance from every angle, his fins like seaweed billowing around Lance’s legs, muted where they lingered on his wetsuit, sun bright and blinding where they touched his exposed calves and feet and forearms.

“Alright,” Lance breathed, and sucked in a deep lungful of air, settling his arms tentatively around Keith’s neck as he did.

The way out below was short but labyrinthian. Lance wrenched his eyes shut and clung to Keith as they wound through the depths of the rocks in some unknowable pattern that Keith had memorized long ago, the pressure like heavy cotton pushing in on Lance’s ears. His limbs knocked up against bedrock a few times, but that was it, and it had only been about thirty seconds when he felt the pressure lifting. They were at the surface again and the sun was on his face.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Lance said as he caught his breath, his bare feet brushing along one of the slimy pocked boulders as an incoming wave bobbed them back against the broad side of it. Keith braced one hand along the top edge above Lance’s head so the wave wouldn’t sweep them away as it retreated again, and Lance found himself babbling as the intimate position they were in caught up with his brain. “I totally thought you were gonna drown me for a sec there, Keith, you know, like a siren or something. I’m the perfect siren victim after all—they always go for the handsome ones—and I mean, just a couple minutes down there, and BAM, no more Lance. It’s that evil look in your eyes. Yeah, _that_ one! What’s a guy supposed to think?”

Keith’s gaze was scathingly mischievous as Lance spewed his nonsense. “Please. If I was a siren I would’ve drowned you years ago.”

“Wha— _Keith!_ ” Lance spluttered with mortified indignance. That was somehow a horrific dig at Lance’s pride and the biggest compliment all at once, and Lance was left short-circuiting between enraged and pleased. The next wave that came crashing in was a big one, and Keith had to brace his other hand on the rock by Lance’s shoulder to keep from flattening Lance to the rock with his weight. Lance had to physically avert his eyes. This was getting dangerous, fast. “What’s the plan here, mullet?”

“The humpbacks are unusually active today,” he explained. “There’s an orca in the area, I heard her coming in from the north while I was out in the kelp forest last night. The other whales are all pissed. It’s awesome. They’re close to shore and they've been breaching and lobtailing non-stop all day. I thought you might want to see.”

“Oh,” Lance gasped. “We’re gonna—”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

“Yeah!” Lance exclaimed, his heart beginning to race in his chest for a totally different reason. They were going to swim with the whales, _holy shit,_ Keith had never let him do this before. He’d taken Lance out swimming beyond the shore, but never very far, and never with _whales_. “Yes! _Fuck yes!_ But— But what if someone sees us from the shore? Or from one of the whale-watching tour boats?” The thought of having the Coast Guard sent out after them by some well-meaning citizen didn’t sound like Lance’s idea of a good time, no matter how elated he was at the prospect of an up-close and personal whale-watching session.

Keith looked up at the sky. Lance followed his gaze; it was a dark and cloudy day, the sun muted in shades of gray beyond the rolling clouds, not thick enough for rain but just thick enough to keep the city suspended in twilight. The ocean was rockier than usual, indicating a storm coming in off the sea. The clouds darkened to wrought iron near the horizon line. But that was far, and the wind was still gentle; they had plenty of time.

“It’s dark,” Keith reasoned, “and there’s a storm coming. The tour boats won’t go out today. Nobody’s gonna see us.”

“Okay,” Lance relented easily, even though he knew they were making about eleven bad decisions right now, each stupider than the last.

“Hang onto my back?” Keith suggested, waiting until the next wave had gone out to turn around in place. “We’re gonna swim out a few miles from here. Don’t let go of me.”

“Hooo boy, that’s really far,” Lance breathed, mostly to himself. In a decent boat, a few miles out was hugging the shoreline. For a swimmer all alone, a few miles out was _‘I’ve been caught in a riptide and I’m probably going to die.’_

“You scared?”

_“No.”_

“Because we don’t have to—”

“Keith, you promised me a whale show! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

With a huff Keith sunk his face half into the water, blowing an irritated spout of bubbles before shooting off into the next wave, leaving Lance to cling helplessly to his shoulders or else be left behind. For the first few minutes as they sped away from the cliffside Lance tried to keep his head underwater except to take quick breaths, wary of being spotted from above. Only once they were far enough that he could see the Wharf and the Boardwalk beyond the sharp southward bend of the shoreline did he stop trying to stay under, and switched to trying to keep his head above the rocking sea. They were moving at an angle, not straight out to sea but out-and-north, in the vague direction of the Natural Bridges State Beach. As he watched the shoreline move gradually south, anticipation kicked up in his belly.

Almost like he knew what Lance was thinking, Keith came to a pause and surfaced, adjusting to face Lance. “See any yet?”

“No. Where— OH.”

Not fifty yards off a towering gray tail rose out of the water, sending a spray of white seafoam into the air before slapping the surface on its decent. No sooner had Lance seen that one than another tail followed its lead a bit farther off, and then a third before that one had even finished falling.

_“Woah.”_

“They’re talking to each other,” Keith said, following Lance’s gaze to yet another tail as it slapped the surface once, twice, three times. “It's like a warning.”

Lance marveled detachedly; he was captivated, spinning in place as best he could to catch sight of the tails as they broke the surface. Every direction held yet another whale to see, sometimes accompanied by a geyser of seawater expelled from a blowhole, sometimes showing off that distinctive arch along their colossal backs that gave them their name and made them recognizable even from a great distance. From what Lance remembered, orcas were a natural predator to some of the whale species that migrated here to California every year. It must be a big deal to have one nearby. He'd never seen so many of the humpbacks at the surface all at once like this, a cacophony of words shouted across miles. He wondered what exactly they were saying.

“So they’re talking about the orca?”

“Pretty much, yeah. They’re agitated. I doubt the orca is here to hunt anything other than seals, but still, they’re known to separate other whales’ young from their parents when they’re hunting and humpbacks are maternal and protective. They'll put up a nasty fight if the orca comes near them. Orcas don’t even usually even come this far south, so they’re _really_ mad right now.”

“Yeah, I’ve never seen one here before. Oh, _wow_ , look at that, Keith!” He almost knocked Keith underwater in his excitement and his pointing; not too far off, a group of three whales was breaching all at once, a full-bodied motion that had the breath punching from Lance’s lungs. It was surreal and mind-blowing and infinitely humbling, the amount of raw power a creature that large would have to possess to propel itself that far out of the water. It was a stark reminder that creatures more mysterious and majestic than anything on land lived their whole lives out here in the sea, out of sight, out of mind, intelligent enough for complex social hierarchies and communication skills. His jaw was probably unhinging from how far it had dropped. “Did you see that?” he gasped, turning to see that Keith was staring at him rather than the whales. So, he missed it. Ugh. “There are four of them right over there,” Lance explained. “Can we go closer?”

Keith hummed. “I dunno, Lance, this is probably close enough.”

“Please,” Lance whined. He was not above begging right now. “Keith, _please_. Come on, I’ll do anything you want, you can choose the next eighty movies on movie night, I’m serious. I’ll get you your shitty mint ice cream even though it’s gross and evil. I’ll stop bugging you to let me cut your hair for you,” he resorted when Keith still wouldn’t budge. Desperate times called for desperate measures! “I'll just shut up about it and let you butcher it in peace, I swear.”

“You’re serious,” Keith realized with shock. “Okay. Okay, fine, just stop _looking_ at me like that. Ugh, why do I let you talk me into this shit..”

“This was your stupid idea,” Lance reminded him as Keith geared up to take them in closer. Instead of swimming underwater, Keith kept his head above with Lance’s this time, watching the whales from Lance’s point of view as they drew closer, pushing their way through the red-brown seaweed that littered the surface in this part of the ocean. As they passed through, a group of small harbor seals detached themselves from the floating flora, dipping under and resurfacing nearer to Keith and Lance, swimming around them for a hot minute like a group of over-excited dogs. Lance found himself laughing as Keith reached out to pet one and the seal just _let_ him. Nuzzled against his hand like some kind of Labrador. The other three seals barked and darted off due south, but this one lingered.

“Oh my god,” Lance said as the seal pushed in so close it began to actually hinder their progress.

“This one likes me,” Keith explained, screwing up his face as the seal pushed up underneath Keith’s chin, his long whiskers tickling Lance’s cheek. “He always has. I don’t even know why.”

“This is too rich,” Lance laughed, eagerly leaning in to rub the seal on the back of the head. “I can’t believe you have a pet dog and you never told me.”

“He’s not my pet,” Keith grumbled. “I just got a hook out of his flipper once. And feed him, sometimes. And he sunbathes with me on the rocks outside the grotto—”

“Keith!” Lance wheezed as the seal barked happily in his face. “This is _that_ seal? Oh my god. Keith, that’s the absolute definition of a pet! He’s so cute, what’s his name?”

“....” Keith mumbled.

“Keith, I’m gonna drag it out of you one way or another, I know you named him, you named _all_ your pet anemones and starfish—”

“They’re not pets! His name is Dipper, okay? Are you happy?”

Dipper barked again, like he knew his name, and Lance threw his head back and let out a delighted cackle. But right as he did his head struck something hard and solid that almost gave him whiplash as it rose from the water. From upside-down he watched the tail moving skyward as if in slow motion, sending a muted thrill into his gut. The tail alone was the size of a minivan. He hung frozen in its shadow.

“Shit,” Keith gasped, “shit!” And before Lance could blink Keith had tackled him underwater. So he didn’t see the tail fall, but he sure as hell felt it. The entire ocean pulsed around him, doubling the already dense pressure on his ears, and a dull roar followed in his eardrums as Keith surged back to the surface with his hand cinched firmly around Lance’s bicep. Lance gasped as fresh air hit his face. He hadn’t gotten to take a breath before they went under and his lungs ached. But he had no time to get his bearings. Five feet away another whale was breaching—or, the same whale? No, there was another. Three of them.

“Shit shit shit shit,” Keith was hissing next to him, and Lance gasped as Keith pulled him in close, cementing his arms around Lance’s waist.

“It’s okay,” Lance said, although the sheer size of the whales alone was terrifying, especially with three of them on all sides. They just had to move, had to get out from between them. They were fine. “They're just humpbacks.”

“No, the _orca_ ,” Keith hissed. “I wasn’t listening, I should’ve been listening—”

“The orca?” Lance breathed out.

“Hold still,” Keith demanded, dipping his head under to look around. Numbly Lance waited until Keith froze in place. Then he followed the direction of Keith's gaze, past the third whale who was now diving back under, revealing a black fin just behind it, stark and defined against the silver-gray sky.

Oh, the sudden primal fear that a single black fin could instill in a man. Lance had never felt anything like it. It was bone-deep. Chilling.

And then, a barking sound. Sharp and loud through the ocean sounds, slicing deftly through their slow-motion panic. Lance didn't have to speak seal to know that bark was pure distress.

Keith surfaced, sucking in a strangled breath. “Dipper!”

A whip of the tail, a flash of fins; Keith was gone and Lance was alone.

Keith was gone and Lance was _alone_.

He was alone in the water with three furious humpback whales and a hunting orca and Keith was gone, Keith had _left him_ —

— _don’t panic_ —

— _just tread water, Lance, orcas don’t eat humans_ —

_—but they eat seals, and your skin is the same color as a seal’s, it’s freckled like Dipper’s—!_

Survival mode kicked into overdrive. That black fin dipped under and Dipper’s barking got louder, but then he lost track of it all because the whale closest to him was on the move again and he had to dive out of the way. When he surfaced again the ocean was in chaos.

It was like standing on the freeway as a semi-truck spun out of control, starting a pile-up, and trying not to get crushed between them. It was all he could do not to drown. He tried to get out from between them but he could barely even get a breath, let alone get his bearings, and he just kept getting slammed by the waves back into the sides of the whales, which seemed to grow angrier and angrier by the second. He was almost out from the center of the wreck when a particularly large wave slammed him under. He went deep this time, maybe ten feet below the roiling surface, and collided with a solid object as it pushed its way upward, a behemoth from the deep. This one was different. Didn’t share the wrinkled texture that the humpbacks had about them. It was smooth, almost slimy. Like a manta ray, except the size of a train car.

Lance was pushed clean out of the water as it breached, and he slid off its back, crashing into the water—not slowly enough to miss the white markings along the whale’s underbelly, but not fast enough to swim away as it dipped under again, gearing toward him, slamming him purposefully with its weight and sending him surging underwater so fast it made his head spin. All he could think was, _this is how they disorient their prey._ His head was getting fuzzy. His lungs ached, and his throat and nose were on fire from the assault of saltwater. He hadn’t gotten to take a breath at all this time around.

His eyes burned like he'd dipped them in acid as he opened them underwater, looking for the surface, watching as the lattice of soft sunlight blacked out above him with a stark silhouette.

Then, suddenly, there were lights. _Other_ lights.

Psychedelic lights, shooting up between him and the black whale-shape, blurred lines of luminescent rainbow, like some kind of deep-sea jellyfish, a biological wonder that shouldn’t have been this near to the shore or this close to the surface. Shouldn't have even existed.

He stared up at the swirl of undefinable lights in abject wonder, forgetting the fire in his chest and throat and eyes for a split second as they chased the black silhouette away. He turned up and over, watching the whale as it dove over and down and disappeared into the fade of blue below. The rainbow chased the whale all the way into oblivion, a flurry of indiscernible lights that flashed and spun, converging as it grew smaller and fainter until it was only a speck of light in the depths far below. A muted star. Lance knew he should be surfacing now but he couldn’t help it. He just floated there, staring, his eyes burning and burning. Then, the rainbow started to grow again. Or, grow closer, and yeah it was coming back and Lance’s vision was so _blurry_ he still couldn’t tell what it was but it didn’t matter because he couldn’t move anyway.

Between one moment and the next it was on him, and around him, and he almost inhaled seawater in his panic. But he didn’t even have time to before he had broken the surface.

He had to sputter and cough and blink for a solid minute when the cold air touched his face again before he was able to actually comprehend what his stinging eyes were seeing. That the lights he’d seen were Keith, that this was _Keith_ , that Keith was the one with a stranglehold on his torso right now and not some new terrifying deep sea void-creature, that Keith had come back for him. “Keith,” he spluttered, his voice raw and salt-wrecked. “Keith, you’re—you’re glowing. What—”

Keith didn’t bother to answer. His face still looked sort of fuzzy and undefined, but he was obviously beside himself. As soon as Lance’s coughing slowed Keith was on the move, flying toward shore with Lance in tow as fast as possible while still allowing for his unfortunate need to breathe air. He didn’t even aim for the grotto; they were heading to the nearest part of the shoreline, somewhere in the Natural Bridges area. Although, again, he couldn’t freaking see so they could have been in Cuba for all he knew. But it must have been Natural Bridges because the swim inland took less than half the time that the swim out had taken. Lance’s heart didn’t slow in its painful hammering the whole way there, not even when Keith eased them in toward a heavily eroded cliff face, dodging between sharp rocks to bring them in under a divot where they couldn’t be seen from above.

Lance crawled up into the shallow crevice to get out of the water for a moment, slipping on slick algae as he went. His limbs felt like they were made of jelly. Keith flatly refused to let go of him, so he ended up dragging Keith up with him as the waves splashed around them. Collapsing on his back, Lance coughed deeply a few more times, trying to dislodge some of the more deeply settled seawater, but knowing it might stay there for a while after this.

As he opened his eyes again he saw Keith sitting up, leaning over him, hands hovering but not touching, eyes roaming as he desperately checked Lance over for injuries. The sky was darker behind him than Lance remembered, making it even harder to see with his eyes still tearing up in protest of all the uninvited salt. Lance grabbed Keith’s hand to catch his attention.

“I’m fine,” he said, and delightedly moved onto the much more pressing issue. “Keith, look at you, you’re _glowing_.” He was still glowing, although it was starting to fade now. It was those weird diamond scales doing the trick, now that Lance had a second to look more closely, the ones trailing down his sides and crisscrossing at the tips of all his fins. So _that’s_ what those were. Incredible. Keith didn’t look like he thought so, though. He looked like he wanted to cry, or scream, or possibly both at once. That didn’t sit right with Lance, who felt like he could take on another ten orcas right about now with this much adrenaline kicking around his gut. Didn’t Keith get it? “You just scared off that killer whale like it was _nothing!_ ” Lance laughed. He felt high under the weight of everything that had just happened, and he shook Keith’s hand around for good measure. “That was _amazing_ , Keith! _You’re_ amazing! Fuck! You’re so— god, you look so...”

He wasn’t sure what he was planning on saying, but he didn’t get to, because Keith’s lips came slamming down on his.

It was more like a punch to the mouth than a kiss, honestly. Their teeth clacked and their noses smashed together, and Lance sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. Then Keith was reeling backward, and it was over even quicker than it had happened.

Panic blossomed on Keith’s face. “Shit.”

“Wait,” Lance blurted, his other hand flying to the back of Keith’s neck to keep him from pulling back all the way.”

The tense curiosity that washed over Keith then was swift and burning and all-consuming, sweeping across his face like fire across a mountainside. It was as if he’d fallen under a spell, and for one crazy second Lance found himself wondering if maybe, between the two of them, Lance was the siren.

“Hey is there someone down there? Hello!”

Keith shot upright.

The ledge above them was blocking them from the view of whoever was standing on the cliff’s edge some fifty feet above them, but there was another voice that joined the first, a woman’s this time. “I’m telling you, Alex, I saw someone swimming in. Maybe we should call someone.”

“I— I’m okay!” Lance shouted up hoarsely, and Keith gave him a fleeting, unreadable look before slipping off the rock back into the water.

And Lance was left alone in the gathering wind to climb his way up the side of the sea-battered rocks. To rub at his eyes and realize he had just climbed the Natural Bridges themselves. To comprehend the fact that Keith had just impulse-kissed him beneath one of the most popular tourist spots in the city. To assure the two strangers ogling him in shock and concern that he wasn’t half-drowned and that he just got sucked out from the beach by a riptide and it was no biggie. If they still looked somewhat disconcerted by his riptide-defying swimming skills, his freakish knack for rock climbing, his concerningly absent fear of death, and his presiding good mood as he calmly strolled away down the millennia-old rock formation toward the shore in his wetsuit and bare feet, well, that was no concern of his.

The gray sky opened up on his long walk home, and it began to rain. He angled his face skyward so that he could feel it in full, not caring if the people in the cars that passed him by saw him grinning like a love-drunk fool at the sky, hair plastered to his face and his palms filling up with rain. The drizzle continued on into a thunderstorm that night as Lance lay awake staring at the drops carving rivers down his window, replaying that kiss under Natural Bridges over and over and over in his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***PLEASE DON'T SKIP THIS NOTE***
> 
> So, I try to make the depiction of ocean wildlife in this story is as realistic as possible in this story. The humpback/orca situation is actually something I once witnessed firsthand! It was and still is one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life. Seeing a wild orca is very humbling. Indescribable. Although, luckily, I was not in the water for it haha. 
> 
> I want to explain that the situation in this story where Lance was in actual danger is astronomically unlikely. (I’d even go so far as to say the orca would have left Lance alone entirely if Keith had not been antagonizing the whole situation and confusing the hell out of the poor whale, and if Dipper hadn’t been there exacerbating the whole situation. lol.) Orcas DO NOT hunt or harm humans in the wild! There has never been a single documented orca attack in the wild that was more than 'whoops the orca thought he was a seal for a sec a gave a nibble' and that has only happened like 3x in modern history. In captivity, yes, orcas have killed people. But that is because captivity for whales is akin to acute torture! It’s like if a human was kept in a 5x5 glass box for their whole life. It turns them into sad, angry, aggressive creatures, and it shortens their life spans by decades. Therefore, if you care about these extremely intelligent and emotional beings, please do not visit or in any way support institutions (such as Sea World) that keep captive whales, unless they are keeping them specifically for rehabilitation and release or unless the whale can't survive in the wild due to extenuating circumstances. 
> 
> I know this was a lot and kinda serious for a mermaid au fic lol, but I couldn't in good conscience post this chapter without addressing this, so thank you for listening! Hope you enjoyed this chapter!
> 
> Edit:  
> Hey I doodled [art](https://speakswords.tumblr.com/post/182670281296/eyyy-by-inspiration-of-where-the-water-meets-the) of what I imagined Keith to look like if you're curious!  
> [Same link but twitter if that's your playpen of choice](https://twitter.com/speak_swords/status/1094025059159572480?s=20)


	3. The Redwoods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The lighthouse Keith mentions](https://ap.rdcpix.com/507623858/6d22c2282401dcf6a227b949d24839e6l-m0xd-w1020_h770_q80.jpg)  
> [The redwoods at night](https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/Schwartz-blog-8.25.14-6.jpeg) 
> 
> and thus, things begin to pick up... (eyes emoji x14)

The entire next day was a walk on cloud nine for Lance, and he didn’t care who knew it. Didn’t care that his family all noticed that he was singing loudly both in the shower and in the kitchen as he ran around making breakfast and lunch for the day. Didn’t care that his first-period Math teacher had to call his name five times before Lance heard her. Didn’t care that when he looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom halfway through U.S. History his entire body was radiating with the truth of it. It was so dreadfully obvious, even with his vision still a little blurry from yesterday.

He spent a minute longer in the bathroom than he needed to, maybe, staring at his sun-freckled, brown-eyed, stupidly happy reflection and taking a moment to really let this soak in.

_Yeah. So, a few things that we learned yesterday:_

__ 1. _I am not straight._

That was a thing, apparently. Bisexuality was a thing that some people had, and Lance had it, ohhh he had it so bad, _how_ did it take so long for him to realize this was a thing. This was very much a thing.

      2.    _I am in love._

God, he was so much in love it was like the size of the sun. It was older than the universe. It was redder than road flares and bluer than summer and deeper than Lance had ever dived before, bursting with potential and promise, a field full of nesting fireflies poised for flight at the slightest sound. _I am in love..._

3.  _...with Keith._

The boy he’d known since he was ten. The boy who had stayed in Santa Cruz after meeting Lance when he really didn’t have any reason to, and never owned up as to why. The boy who fought a killer whale for him yesterday. His best friend. _That_ Keith.

     4.    _I am screwed._

This was the worst thing that could have ever possibly happened to him. Why? Because Keith lived in the ocean and Lance did not, and this wasn’t a rom-com. This was real life.

 __  5. _I don’t care because I’m in love, baby!_

6.  _Fade to black!_

7.  _Roll credits!_

8.  _I_

9.  _am_

10. _in love!!!_

 

“What is up with you today,” Hunk prodded immediately after returning to his seat beside Lance's after turning his test in. It was their shared Physics class, and the last class of the day, so Lance was practically vibrating out of his seat with the need to get out of here. “You’re in such a good mood, and you’re all antsy. What happened?”

_Nothing. Everything!_

Biting his lip, Lance tapped his pencil hard against his desk and fought the urge to blurt out every last detail of the six-year pine-fest that had culminated yesterday at Natural Bridges. Nyma had been a little bit offended at his rocking good vibes, and that was probably why Rolo had flipped him off right as the Physics teacher walked in. He got sent to detention for it, and normally that would have pleased Lance (their friendship was brittle at best), but honestly, he just couldn’t care less. Nothing could touch him right now, not even post-test anxiety. Physics who?

“Lance..?”

“It’s nothing,” he whispered back to Hunk, although he couldn’t stop smiling even long enough to lie.

After the bell rang he practically ran to Laura’s last class so he could rush her away from her friends and into the car, even though his muscles were still all sore and stiff from the marathon swim yesterday. Together they picked up Gabi and Ben from the middle school, like usual, and he nearly ran a traffic light in his haste to get home. He didn't even bother following everyone inside the house to say hi before heading across the street for the cliff’s edge. Too impatient. Instead he waited for everyone to exit the car and then left his backpack on the front passenger seat Laura had just vacated, then slipped out through the garage before anyone could ask him where he was headed off to, ducking around that buff jogger who ran by every day with a shouted apology, picking up speed as he jumped the withered old fence. He could hear the jogger calling after him in confusion as he started the climb down, but for once he didn't care if anyone saw him. He just wanted to get there already!

But Keith wasn’t readily visible when Lance finally got into the grotto.

It was only when he skipped over to the edge of the lake that he saw him, down at the very bottom. He was curled up in the deepest divot in the uneven rolling bottom of the rocks, and Lance almost would’ve thought he was asleep if he hadn’t known how much Keith hated sleeping on the rocks. As it was, he wondered why the hell Keith was curled up like that. He wasn’t doing anything except maybe staring at his watch—it was hard to tell from here. If he wasn’t such a blinding shade of red Lance might not have even seen him.

“Keith!” he called out, dropping to his knees and splashing the surface of the water to draw Keith’s attention. The effect was immediate. Keith’s head snapped up, he made split-second eye contact with Lance, and then he bolted for the underwater exit. “What— HEY!” Lance screeched as Keith ripped his little wooden door away, and smacked the surface of the water hard enough to splash water directly into his own face. It was enough to stop Keith from actually leaving. His arms drooped, lowering the makeshift driftwood door back into place. Why.. Why was he acting like this? What was going on?

Lance sat there numbly, completely unable to parse this as he watched Keith slowly lose the battle with himself until finally he swam to the surface and poked his head up a few feet away from Lance, revealing a deeply guilty expression.

“Lance. H-hi.”

“Keith, what the hell—”

Cutting him off, Keith backed away from the edge, putting a wide berth of space between them as he spoke. “Listen, about yesterday—I’m so sorry. I _never_ should have done that.”

Lance’s stomach twisted with equal parts shock and dismay. Was that really how Keith felt? But he’d been so sure… Training his eyes downward, he willed himself not to cry. He was not gonna cry in front of Keith. “Okay. Is this about the orca or about you kissing me.”

“ _Both_. I should’ve been paying more attention to how close the orca was. I  never should’ve brought you near enough for that to have happened in the first place! It’s just—you’re so fucking _distracting!”_ he accused angrily. But as was often the case with Keith, the anger was a front for lost desperation, for helpless earnestness. And the more distraught Keith grew, the more Lance felt like he was starting to understand what was happening. “I don’t know why I kissed you. I didn’t mean to, it just happened. You scared the shit out of me,” he breathed, “I was just… just—”

“Keith,” Lance told him fiercely, “first of all, I’m the one who begged you to bring me closer to those humpbacks, so let’s share the blame for that one, yeah?” The torment hadn’t left Keith’s eyes yet, and Lance still felt like he was fumbling in the dark, but his gut was telling him not to let Keith talk his way out of this. It was too late; they’d already taken the leap. They needed to go forward, no matter the cost. “Second of all,” he said, easing his tone into something much gentler, hoping against hope that the kiss wasn’t a fluke but was something more, _please be something more_ … “Stop apologizing for kissing me, because if you’d stayed with me just one second longer, then I’d have been kissing you back. Dumbass,” he tacked on last-second with a sniff, just to even the playing field since Keith was a jerk who tried to swim away rather than talk about this like men. If the insult came out more fond than offended, well, it wasn’t his fault. He was fond of this dumbass.

Keith blinked up at him with wide eyes, still mostly submerged, a little spurt of surprised bubbles rising from under his nose. Lance cleared his throat, shifting in place so that he was sitting at the water's edge instead of kneeling. He wanted to jump in, but he hadn't changed into his trunks or wetsuit yet. So he settled for kicking his sandals off and sticking his calves in the water, leaning his elbows on his knees.

“So yeah,” he started, tugging at a frayed patch on his shorts, a little overwhelmed at the prospect of putting words to all these larger-than-life feelings, but feeling his confidence coming back at the hopeful expression currently rising on Keith's face. “I know we’ve never talked about this before. I’ve never talked about it with anyone actually. But um. I don’t just Iike girls, Keith, I like boys too. First time I’ve ever said that out loud, but uh... Yeah. I guess you probably didn’t know that since I haven’t exactly advertised it, but yeah.” He rubbed at his neck, hoping his face wasn't as red-hot as it felt. “That’s a thing. Some people are just like that. Do you…”

“I don't like girls at all.”

“Uh-huh.” Lance couldn't help the amused grin that crept onto his face at Keith's ready and immediate answer.

“I mean, not like that,” Keith clarified needlessly, drifting closer, leaving ripples in his wake. “I like boys. But I... mostly I just like you.”

“That's— I like you too,” Lance blurted, and you know what? Fuck it. He dug his phone and keys out of his pocket, depositing them on the plastic chair beside him before slipping into the water, clothes and all.

Keith flushed, still almost totally submerged. He barely lifted his mouth above the water enough to speak. “More than Nyma?” he mumbled.

“God, _way_ more than Nyma, are you kidding? I told you, Keith. You’re my best friend in the universe and you saved me from becoming killer whale food yesterday, and you know I hate admitting anything you do is cool, but, that was _kind of_ the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Keith had his lower lip puffed out in a pout, and Lance wanted absolutely nothing more in that moment than to kiss it. He wondered if Keith would like that. If he'd do that thing where he pretended he was still upset so Lance would act like a fool trying to make him break his stoic composure.

“Come’ere,” Lance grinned, the water sloshing as he reached out, blindly searching until he found Keith’s arm.

Instead of grabbing it he reached past it, letting his hand curl around Keith's waist, tugging him closer. As his hand settled Keith's scales lit up a bit in that area, little flashes of light zipping down his hip of their own accord.

“What the hell is up with this light show?” Lance murmured, detachedly, his eyes locked now on Keith’s side as every color of the rainbow made its way down and back up again. It had always been nuts to him that these kinds of neon displays were biologically possible. Deep-sea species were almost from another planet. “I didn’t get to ask you about that, yesterday.”

“I dunno,” Keith answered. “It’s happened a couple times now, but never all at once like that before.”

“Probably a survival response,” Lance wondered, thinking back on every show he’d ever watched on deep-sea hunting patterns. It was always ‘eat or be eaten’ in the sea, and in the deep sea, the farther from the surface you went and the nearer to the Abyssal Plane, the more the difference between life and death was often as simple as ‘light’ or ‘no light.’ “You know, like a gut instinct that kicked in because we were in danger.”

“Probably,” Keith agreed. The shape of this conversation was old and familiar; the two of them guessing at Keith’s nature and past. “At least, that’s what I’ve been guessing. But then, why would it be happening again now...”

“Hmm.” Lance eyed him. “I have an idea on that front too. Mind if I test it?”

“Okay,” Keith responded softly as Lance reeled him in, leaning back against the rock for support so he didn’t slide down into deeper water. When he was sure he wasn’t going to slip underwater, he brought his free hand to Keith’s carefully blank face. It was always so hard to tell what Keith was thinking. What he was feeling. Keith wanted it that way; Lance knew that. But it didn’t mean Lance didn’t spend most of his time trying to see past the veil Keith carried around his heart. He took the strands of wet black hair hanging nearest to Keith’s eyes and brushed them out of his face, behind his earfins. The second he did, a flicker of lights shot across the fin and on down Keith’s sides, including a brief flicker of the brightest blue directly across his cheekbones and nose, almost like freckles. They disappeared quickly but they were _definitely_ there.

“Nice,” Lance breathed. Test: successful.

“What?” A flash of those bioluminescent freckles again. Double-nice.

“Scientific proof that you think I’m hot,” Lance preened, earning a reproachful look and a hand directly to the face that smooshed his nose and pushed his head into the rock. “Ow.”

“Shut up,” Keith grumbled, but it wasn’t clear whether he was annoyed, embarrassed, or amused.

“In all seriousness,” Lance said, his voice muffled through Keith’s hand, “I think this is kind of an important development? It’s a really big clue where your mom came from. I mean, there’s really only one part of the ocean that breeds creatures that glow, Keith. And if your dad didn’t glow, then..”

The hand released Lance’s face from captivity, moving down to his shoulder instead, which was triple-nice. “You think my mom came from somewhere in the midnight zone?”

 _That’s still like ninety percent of the ocean,_ Lance didn’t bother to point out, because there was a flicker of excitement in Keith’s eyes, a little spark that he always tried to smother but was never quite able to before Lance saw it. Even if he never openly admitted it, Lance knew Keith was curious about his past and his people. And if it was true that his mom was a deep sea mer, then the chances of finding any others of Keith’s kind were approximately zero as long as he stayed here near the shore and the surface. He would have to go somewhere far, far away if he ever wanted to find them.

The thought of such an eventuality made Lance’s chest ache.

“Maybe,” he answered, letting a lot more emotion slip into the word than he meant to.

Blinking slowly, Keith drifted a few inches closer, his hair fanning out on the water’s surface above his shoulders like spilled ink. Tentatively, his hands came up to brush at the crest of Lance’s jaw. Searching. Keith’s eyes flickered downward. He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, like he wanted to address that elephant in the room that they always sort of ignored, but then in one smooth motion he leaned in and kissed Lance instead.

The kiss was softer this time. Not hesitant, but careful. And wet. Keith’s lips were cold and wet, and so was his skin as Lance tilted his head, making room for him, pressing his nose into Keith’s cheek, feeling the soft breath escaping Keith’s nose onto his own as he did so. The cave was quiet save for the rhythmic sloshing of the water against the timeless walls, the subdued echoes of their breath in the farthest pockets of rock. Lance pulled Keith in closer, speaking his feelings like a language on Keith’s lips. The hands on Lance’s jaw moved—roamed—one to the back of his neck, the other to toy with the sopping wet t-shirt collar that clung to his skin, pushing him against the rock even as the other hand disagreed and tried to tug him closer. They couldn’t possibly get any closer than they already were anyway.

When Lance took the hand that was on Keith’s face and ran it through his hair, Keith sighed, long and deep. His skin might’ve been cold, but his breath was hot. And that was so painfully _Keith_. Hot and cold all at once, somehow. It hit Lance, again, right over the head, the fact that he was _hopelessly in love_ with this boy, and while Keith was still sighing Lance pressed in deeper, licking into his mouth, slotting them together perfectly.

Oh, man, the sound Keith made. His tail moved underwater, his fins tangling with Lance’s legs even more so than before, until Lance wasn’t sure if it was happening on accident or on purpose anymore. All he knew was the taste of Keith, sea salt and salmon and just a little bit of strawberry chapstick, the sound of their tandem breath, the feel of soft, silky hair between Lance’s fingers. The knowledge that he was the only one who had ever been this close to Keith. The only one who’d ever touched him this way. How desperately he wanted to be the only one who ever did. _Burned_ with the want of it.

Lance broke the kiss, just for a second, pushing Keith back just barely far enough to look at his face. Outside the sun was still up but on its way down now, turning the interior of the cave into a surrealist painting, the surface of the water like dayglo orange slices, the rock walls purple and blue like desert mountains in the evening. Keith’s eyes caught the glow of the approaching sunset too as they slowly opened. He looked almost as wrecked as Lance felt, which was absurdly satisfying.

Keith’s hand trailed after his jaw, his eyes dark and half-lidded. That look alone sent a surge of heat through Lance’s core that should have probably shamed him with its intensity, but didn’t.

The thought struck him, then, that he didn’t have to worry much about being the only person to ever touch Keith like this. Keith had no interest in seeking out other humans; harbored no plans to seek out other mer as far as Lance knew.

There was just…

Just Lance.

And suddenly, for the first time ever, Lance was not okay with that.

“Lance?”

“What?” Lance blinked out of his reverie, realizing he’d been staring and silent for a bit too long. “Oh. I just... I dunno, I'm just thinking. Are you sure you actually like me or is just that I'm the only person you ever see?”

“That's not why I like you,” Keith argued, his eyebrows curving downward.

“I mean, you don't really _know_.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Lance huffed.

“Lance, you're really dumb if you believe that. Trust me when I say that I'd like you best no matter how many people I met.”

Okay wow. That was—wow. Like, he’d heard the words ‘I like you’ earlier and they’d just kissed for like ten straight minutes, but still… wow. This might take some time to truly sink in. Still. “I'd feel better if you met some other people though,” Lance insisted. Because once he set his mind on something, there was just no stopping him. That was one thing he and Keith had in common. “I feel kinda like I'm Stockholm Syndrome-ing you.”

Keith rolled his eyes. “You are _not_. I could leave whenever I wanted.”

“I know.” Lance ignored the surge of fear that reminder elicited. He fought against the sudden urge to anchor Keith to the ground like a tree in a hurricane, and moved on to the actual point he'd been working his way towards. “Hey, do you wanna meet my friends?”

He felt Keith’s entire body go tense. “...Hunk and Pidge?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

They’d talked about it before, of course, but ultimately they just kept putting it off. Lance because he was terrified to risk the secret of Keith getting out, even on low-risk friends like Hunk and Pidge, and Keith because he was a professional loner and he’d been raised to stay away from humans for his own safety. Lance was a fluke. He had no interest in meeting other humans as far as Lance knew, and that had always been fine by him.

But that was then. This was now.

Now, Lance felt like it was long overdue. Keith deserved to have _friends_ besides animals and Lance.

“I don’t know,” Keith mumbled, although it came with the air of someone who was ready to give in but was clinging to resistance because they didn’t know any other way.

“I trust them with my life,” Lance promised fervently, “and I think you’d really like them. You guys would get along so well and they’d love you.”

“...Okay,” Keith relented as Lance filled the silence with his patented puppy dog face. “Okay, I trust you, so if you trust them, then whatever.”

“Yes! This is such a good idea, you won’t regret it, Keith. I’ll go get them!”

“Wait, now?!” Keith floundered as Lance abruptly let go and heaved himself up out of the water, pausing afterward to squeegee his shirt with a smidge of regret.

“Yeah, now. Hang tight for a few hours, ‘kay?” Good thing he kept emergency clothes in here, although they were usually reserved for the times when Keith pulled or pushed him into the water unceremoniously. He tugged the plastic bin out of the corner and began to dig through it.

“Why do I let you talk me into this shit,” Keith groaned, and his tail flicked high into the air as he dove below the surface so Lance could change.

But Lance waited for him to surface again before leaving, blowing him a dramatic and sarcastic kiss from the stairwell. Keith blew angry bubbles underwater in response, slapping his tail on the surface. Lance just laughed. “Let’s meet at Hidden Beach later tonight so they don’t have to climb down the cliff. 11pm, okay?” Then, at the very last second, he added a small and sincere, “Love you,” over his shoulder as casually as he could before disappearing into the twilight, not waiting to see how it was received.

He’d always wanted to say that.

 

* * *

**[←]  a literal angel, 3.14dge [:]**

**Wednesday** _\- 7:32pm_

 **(** I need you guys stat **)**

 **(** Emergency sleepover is a go **)**

 

_7:36pm_

**(** **a** **) (** I'm at Sione's soccer game dude sry **)**

 

 **(** **3** **)** **(** And I'm trying to do the physics homework. Can we do it tomorrow? **)**

 

_7:37pm_

**(** Guys I know I'm dramatic a lot, but I'm not being dramatic right now when I invoke the word emergency  **)**

 **(** Please?? **)**

 **(** It's reeeally important **)**

 

_7:43pm_

**(** **a** **) (** Alright alright, I'll be there soon **)**

 **(** Let me just tell my family. Also, I'm gonna need a ride because I drove with them **)**

 

_7:46pm_

**(** **3** **)** **(** Same. Except for the ride part lol **)**

 **(** I'll pick you up Hunk, text me the address of the field you're at **)**

* * *

 

Two hours later Pidge was laying on her stomach on Lance’s bed while Hunk was lounging on the rug in the corner, tossing a hacky sack up and down. Lance was sitting on the floor underneath the window, toying with his whalebone knife and prattling aimlessly about the targeting mechanics on the new Jurassic Park arcade game at the Boardwalk. They’d been talking straight nonsense ever since Hunk and Pidge got here, and okay, he was definitely stalling, but in all honesty, he was a bit of a nervous wreck. He was doing that thing where he talked so fast he forgot to breathe between sentences.

“Right,” Pidge said as Lance paused for a much-needed breath while complaining about the inaccuracy of the rifle upgrade when you passed level 5. “This is all well and good, but what did you really want to tell us, Lance?”

“Yeah buddy,” Hunk said, missing the hacky sack but letting it roll away this time without leaning over for it. “I know when you’re working your way up to something big. Just spit it out.”

“O-okay,” Lance breathed, running his hand through his hair. _Here we go. Just… just do it._ “I uh. I kissed someone yesterday. And… again today.”

They both looked at him expectantly. “Obviously not Nyma,” Pidge guessed.

“A boy,” Lance clarified, and Pidge’s jaw dropped to the bedspread.

Hunk was the first to recover. “That’s cool, do you like him? Wait, do we know him? Wait, back up—you like boys now? Or did you always?”

“You know we fully support you no matter what, Lance.” Pidge twisted around and sat up, scooting forward to the edge of the bed so her legs were hanging off. “I _knew_ you were into someone else when the thing with Nyma didn’t even phase you.”

“Yeah,” he said sheepishly, eyes on the knife in his hands, “I’ve kinda been into him for… Well, forever I guess. Took me awhile to figure it out.”

“So you’re.. bi? Not that the label matters,” Hunk added quickly, waving his hands in the air. “Sorry.”

Lance snorted. “Calm down, Hunk, you’re fine. And yeah, I guess I am. But that’s uh... That’s actually not the big thing I wanted to tell you.” _Here we go, here we go, here we go._

“Oh god,” Pidge sighed, pushing her glasses up her nose and pulling her legs up until they were crisscrossed. “What else could there possibly be that’s a bigger deal than coming out to us?”

Lance chuckled nervously at that and tugged at his shirt collar. “Okay. Uhh. Well, do you remember that day right before sixth grade when you guys ditched me to go to the mall and demo that new game and I went to the beach alone?”

“...Yeah.” Hunk’s eyebrows shot up. “When you met your penpal, Keith.”

“Um. Right,” Lance said. What a shitty cover story. It was honestly nothing short of a miracle that the two of them had bought that all this time. Look, he needed an excuse to talk about Keith to _someone_ , okay, and if Hunk and Pidge thought he lived on the other side of the country and they just chatted online then what was the harm, right? “Yeah,” Lance said, drinking in the surprise on both of his friend’s faces. “It’s Keith.”

“So he’s in town then, huh?” Pidge needled with amusement tugging at her intrigued expression.

“Not really. At least, not in that sense. Look, I haven’t been entirely honest with you guys about him.” Lance abruptly closed the pocket knife, feeling guilty about all the secrets he’d kept from them over the years, all the webs of lies he’d had to spin to keep them and everyone else off Keith’s trail. He hoped they didn’t hate him for this. They’d understand, right?

“What do you mean?” Pidge asked with that slow inquisitive drawl she had about her. The gears were turning in her head now, it was evident in her tone. He could practically see the gleam in her eye.

“Like.. he’s not really a pen pal?” Lance elaborated. “He doesn’t live in Maine. He lives here, and I actually see him in person. Kind of a lot. Almost every day, actually.”

“What?” Hunk wondered, all innocent confusion. “Wait, _what_ , why would you lie about that?”

“Why haven’t we met him?”

“Is he some kind of gangster or something?”

“Is he in the mafia?”

“Is he a crimelord, Lance?”

“Is he in the witness protection program?”

“What? _No_ , no,” Lance reeled, “it’s just... It’s really hard to explain. But I want you guys to meet him though. That’s why I asked you over tonight.”

“Okay… this isn’t strange or ominous at all,” Hunk mumbled.

Lance had to laugh at that. “Look I know it’s weird, but I promise it’ll all make sense once you meet him. I’ll drive.”

Hidden Beach wasn’t terribly far from Lance’s neighborhood. It was only an eight-minute drive this time of night, and as luck would have it the little parking lot was deserted.

Ever since Lance got his first car he and Keith had taken to meeting here about once a week, in the deepest hours of the night between dusk and dawn. It was stupid and risky, but it was nice. Being able to lay out on the soft beach sand together rather than sitting on the hard rocks outside their cave. Being able to look at the stars in a different place, talking from one day straight into the next about anything and everything, whiling away the hours and searching for excuses not to have to go home. Honestly, looking back, it was a miracle it took him so long to figure out how gone he was on Keith.

In the empty lot above Hidden Beach Lance left his car idling, hands lingering on the wheel.

The ride had been quiet, but Hunk was getting truly nervous now. “Okay, _why_ do we have to meet him in a dark parking lot by the ocean. Are you sure he’s not in the mafia? Like, why are you being so weird about this—”

“Hunk, shush,” Pidge interrupted.

Lance silently gave her a look of thanks in the rearview mirror. “You guys love me, right?”

The whole car creaked as Hunk shifted uncomfortably in the passenger’s seat. “What? Yes.”

“How much?”

“That’s a weird question.”

“You’d do anything for me right?” Lance pressed. “Even if it was to keep a huge secret that was really hard to keep?”

“Lance, what are you talking about?” Pidge interjected weakly.

“Just answer.” He threw the car in park and twisted sideways in his seat to look at them both. “I have to know. You’ll get it when you meet him, but Keith is... He’s my best friend. I _love_ him. If I have even the slightest doubt in you guys I can’t let you meet him. So please, just... reassure me?”

Hunk and Pidge exchanged a silent and weighted look with each other. Hunk opted to answer for the both of them. “Lance, I don't know what's going on, but you’re _our_ best friend. We’d never do anything to put someone you love in danger. No matter what.”

“Not even for like.. I dunno.. for science?”

“Again, weird question, but no. Not even then,” Pidge swore.

With a deep breath, Lance unbuckled his seatbelt. That was good enough for him. “Okay. Okay, yeah.” He checked his watch. “Cool. It’s 10:58 and I told him 11, we should head down now.”

“It’s actually 11:01,” Hunk pointed out. “You should really reset your watch, dude. It’s been behind by three minutes for like—”

“Six years,” Lance laughed, emerging from the car and shutting the door quietly behind him, “I know, I know. I’ll get around to it eventually.”

Together they descended the steep wooden staircase that had been built into the cliffside, so weathered and worn that it resembled driftwood and creaked like it was on the verge of collapse with every downward step. The crash of the surf filled the tense silence between each creak. The sand below shone blue in the moonlight, the open stretch between the stairs and the sea smooth and cold and empty of all life.

“So where’s he at?” Hunk wondered as they neared the dark, noisy water. “Still on his way?”

“You could say that.” Lance reached into his pocket for the signal he kept in his car for these Hidden Beach meetups. It was just a little battery-powered light, one of those ones you were supposed to put at the bottom of a fancy floral arrangement. He’d taken one from the cave and tied a string to it. Simple, but effective.

Turning his back on Hunk and Pidge’s baffled gazes, he kicked off his sandals, waded knee-deep in the water, twisted the light on, and hung it by the string into the water.

“Lance, what the hell are you doing?” Pidge called after him from the dry part of the sand.

“Calling Keith,” he said, and no sooner had he said it than Keith immediately surfaced beside him, his wet black hair hanging over his face, and in retrospect maybe Lance should’ve warned them after all because the immediacy of his appearance spooked even Lance. Hunk and Pidge? They _shrieked_. Full volume. As in, his grandparents in Cuba probably heard them.

Startled, Keith lit up to full brightness and bolted.

“No, _no_ ,” Lance shouted and dove after him, brand new fresh-and-dry clothes be damned, barely catching the end of his tail as he headed toward deeper water.

They wrestled for a second in the rolling waves before Keith relented and forced Lance back toward the shallows where he could stand and breathe.

“Lance?!” Hunk was screaming, “Lance!”

“I’m fine,” he shouted back, making a point of pushing Keith’s hair out of his face so they could see he was a _person_ and not the physical manifestation of the zombie-ghost from The Ring. Then he waded in closer to shore, dragging Keith along with him by the bicep. “God, you guys didn’t have to _scream_. You’re gonna wake up the whole neighborhood! Keith, it’s _fine_ ,” he assured him when Keith still looked like he lowkey wanted to bolt and take Lance with him while he was at it. “They just panicked. I didn’t tell them what you were ahead of time so they were just surprised, that’s all.”

Now that he was completely soaking wet there was no point in really bothering so he just stayed half in the water with Keith as he raked his eyes over his friend’s expressions, trying to read them. Mostly, now that they were done panicking, it was only surprise that was left. “Lance,” Pidge said carefully, eyeing the fins where Keith’s ears would’ve been if he was human. “Keith is…”

“Uh-huh.”

Hunk wheezed. “He’s a...?!”

“Yep.”

The surprise began to give way, making room for a hundred other emotions to surface all at once. Hunk’s hands flew to his head. “Oh, wow, this is _so cool! What!_ This is amazing, Lance, you've known mermaids were real since we were _ten?_ How did you possibly keep this a secret?!”

“To keep Keith safe obviously,” Lance defended. Along with whatever other mer were out there. “Can you _imagine_ what would happen if people found out about this? The ocean’s in enough danger as it is, thanks.”

Hunk was too busy taking his shoes off and fawning to even hear his explanation. “Oh my god, this is seriously so cool.” He splashed into the water until he was knee deep, where Keith was now sitting upright and letting the water part around him. “Hi Keith, I'm Hunk! Oh, wait, do you even know what handshakes are?”

“I know what handshakes are,” Keith replied somewhat indignantly, and shook Hunk’s hand.

Pidge shoved her way in then, adjusting her glasses as she went. “Can I look at your tail!”

A little laugh escaped Keith’s throat. “Uh. Sure. Lance?”

“Gotcha,” Lance responded, knowing what Keith was asking for. He hooked his arms beneath Keith’s and waited for the right moment between waves to drag him a few feet farther ashore so that he was almost fully beached. Keith looked at Pidge and flipped his tail over and back again, letting his fins spray seafoam directly at Lance and then fan out in the shallow water to their full length.

“Show off,” Lance jabbed, splashing him back.

Keith ignored him. “I've heard so much about you guys,” he mused as Pidge and Hunk leaned over his tail, babbling excitedly about it in short bursts. “I almost feel like I know you already. Is that weird?”

“Not really,” Hunk said. “We kinda feel like that too, I mean Lance talks about you all the time—”

“Well, except for the fact that you're half fish and live in the ocean,” Pidge interjected. “That's new info. I suppose there's a whole other half of you we don't know about yet.”

“HA!” Lance laughed. “The bottom half, am I right?”

“Wow,” Keith deadpanned, “I hate you so much.”

“Mm, hate you too,” Lance preened, winking down at him. Those cute light-up freckles flashed briefly across Keith’s cheeks before he ducked his head, grabbing Lance by the ankle and yanking his leg out from under him, sending him crashing on his ass into the wet sand.

“Oh my god, I've always wanted to do that to him,” Pidge complained, ignoring Lance's shout of betrayal.

“Same,” Hunk agreed, although he added a contrite, “just a little!” when Lance screeched and splashed him. Keith ended up taking the brunt of the splash since he was sitting right smack between Lance and Hunk, and in retaliation he pushed his tail under Lance's ankles and hauled them in the air, which sent Lance tipping back into the wet sand once again. “Keith, I think you are the missing link in our friend group,” Hunk wheezed as Lance angrily shook the sand from his hair. “Pidge and I are like each other's foils, but we've never had a proper foil for Lance before. There's never been anyone to actually keep him in check.”

“I am uncheckable!” Lance shouted, but went ignored again. Okay, it was officially decided: these three were menaces and never should have been introduced.

“So you can just be out of the water?” Pidge mused, ignoring Lance’s shout of betrayal. “That's cool. Cool cool. Sooo how long can you stay out of the water?”

“Oh, for days if I want,” said Keith, who was clearly loving every second of this. “Although I need to be near water at least so I don't dry out.” To demonstrate, he splashed a bit of water directly on his gills, which were always the first to start hurting.

“Interesting.”

“Pidge,” Lance warned, “I know that tone. Don’t even think about it.”

“What?” Hunk wondered.

It didn’t matter what Lance said; Pidge was already thinking about it. She steepled her fingers in front of her face conspiratorially and plowed on. “I mean, I'm sure you've thought about it, Lance.”

“Of course I have,” Lance admitted, “but it's not safe, Pidge, what if someone sees him? I’m not risking that.”

“What?” Hunk complained. “Pidge, _what?_ ”

“We should take Keith on a field trip!”

“Piiidge,” Lance groaned. But it was too late. Keith had already perked up.

“Like, onto land?” he said, excitement staining every syllable.

“Wait, yeah!” Hunk quickly agreed. “What a good idea! I could carry him up those stairs easy peasy. I bet Keith's always wanted to go a little inland. It's midnight, no one’s gonna see us.”

“Lance, please?” Keith begged.

“No, nope, no-no-no, I don't like it.”

“Come on,” Keith pestered, prying apart Lance’s tightly crossed arms. “I took you to see the whales yesterday. I fought an orca for you, remember?”

“You WHAT,” Hunk wheezed in the background.

Lance grumbled. He knew when he was outnumbered. He’d lost this battle the minute he agreed to introduce two bad influences to the biggest bad influence of them all. “Okay, okay,” he relented. “Fine. God, when did I get this weak.”

“YES!” Keith shouted, clenching his hands into fists in front of him, almost tipping over in his excitement. “I wanna go to the Boardwalk! I wanna ride on a motorcycle! I wanna pet a dog! Can we go to the Luna Cafe? No, wait, can we go to the lighthouse? The orange brick one on the cliff? I’ve always wanted to see the ocean from way up high.”

“Okay no, no, no, no, and hell no,” Lance laughed, “those are all horrible ideas where we would for sure get caught. But... there _is_ this one place I've kinda always wanted to take you.”

The ‘no’s put a pout on Keith’s face but his excitement wasn’t dimmed a single watt. “Where?”

“Lookout spot,” Lance said, directing it at Hunk and Pidge.

“Oh!” Hunk exclaimed. “Great idea, Lance! Let's go!”

“Oh my god, this is happening,” Keith giggled uncharacteristically as Hunk scooped him up into his arms, stumbling backward with a splash as he adjusted to the new weight.

“Woah, you’re way heavier than you look,” Hunk said, his voice strained.

“It's the tail,” Lance explained. “That thing is dense. Pidge, can you keep his fins from dragging while Hunk climbs the stairs? I'm gonna run back to the car for my case of water bottles so I can fill them with seawater before we go.”

By the time Lance was coming back down the stairs (sporting some new dry clothes and a case of water bottles slung up on one shoulder), Hunk was barely to the bottom of the stairs because Keith was laughing so hard at Pidge’s sad attempts to keep his tail and many voluminous fins from dragging on the sand with her short body and tiny arms. The sound echoed up from the beach and warmed Lance’s heart in ways he didn’t know was possible. Man, he should’ve introduced these three years ago. By the time he got back up to his car with his twenty-four bottles of seawater, Keith was already buckled into the middle seat between Hunk and Pidge, his tail slung up over the center console and spreading out across the front passenger seat. He looked positively drunk on excitement.

Inwardly, Lance vowed to take painstaking care to make sure Keith stayed safe and unseen on this adventure. Outwardly, he threw a smirk at Keith in the rearview mirror.

So what if he revved the car loudly while it was still in park just to see Keith’s reaction? He was only human.

He took the long drive through the city more slowly than usual, cruising well under the speed limit and slowing down for yellow lights rather than speeding up so he could give Keith a chance to see as much as possible. They passed bars and neighborhoods and shopping districts and the occasional late night pedestrian and Keith soaked it all in, affording to each new sight more awe than the one that came before it, the traffic lights painting his pale skin and paler fins shades of green, yellow, and red in intervals.

As they moved out of the city and into the foothills of the mountains Lance tossed a couple more of the bottles to him. “Stay hydrated, okay?”

The whole way up the mountain, Pidge and Hunk pestered Keith with questions about ocean life, about how being a mer worked, about what he ate and how he spent his time and where he slept at night and what kind of shenanigans he and Lance got up to. Keith answered dutifully but his heart was only half in it. They had entered the Redwood Forest between one breath and the next. The black shapes of the trees stretched skyward, towering over them so far that you couldn’t see where the ones right next to the car ended without sticking your head out the window and craning it upward, which, now that they were alone on the two-lane highway, Hunk encouraged Keith to do. As he climbed half over Hunk’s lap, slapping Lance in the face with his fins as he went, the brisk mountain air flooded the car from the newly rolled-down window. The sound of the engine and their lone tires on the highway, along with the scent of earthen forest borne to them on the cold and whistling wind, had Keith absorbed in an instant trance. Soon after he stuck his head out the window, Pidge and Hunk gave up their interrogation. They allowed him his reverent silence.

So Lance took over in his stead to fill the time, launching into his own stories of what the two of them had gotten up to over the years. The time last year when Keith almost broke Lance’s arm on accident by sneaking up and tackling him off his surfboard at the beach near the grotto. The time they were nearly seen hanging out under the wharf between the sea-worn columns, and Lance cut his losses after Keith bailed and straight up ran away from the fisherman instead of thinking of a proper cover-up, and how Keith never let him live it down. The time when Keith set part of the table on fire in the grotto just to see if it would burn (it did) and had to push the whole thing into the water, and how Lance never let him live it down. This filled up the next twenty minutes of switchbacking loopy turns as they climbed deeper and deeper into the woods.

“— _and_ he has a pet harbor seal named Dipper,” Lance added, having just given them a retelling of the whole orca vs. humpback vs. Keith showdown. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had any time to pester Keith about that part of it yet. That needed to be rectified.

“It’s short for Little Dipper,” Keith said detachedly. He was still sprawled over Hunk, his neck rested on the door and his hair whipping in the wind.

Pidge jumped on that goldmine before Lance had a chance. “Little Dipper like the constellation? That’s cute.”

“Constellation?” Keith made a confused face at her. “No? Little Dipper like the blue rollercoaster at the Boardwalk.”

Lance choked on a laugh. _“Seriously?_ Oi, fins off the driver!” He shoved Keith’s tail away when he flipped his tail at Lance in retaliation.

“Ohhh, I forgot about the blue one,” Hunk mused. “Aw, I miss that rollercoaster. It was the only one I could go on. The red one is way too much for my stomach.”

“Yeah, they took it out before I got the chance to ride it,” Keith grumbled, and Lance had to look over his shoulder at him in surprise. The way he’d said that was kinda… weird. Like he fully planned on riding the rides at the Boardwalk one day. Which, just, no. Lance was not sure that he was capable of pulling that one off. A midnight car ride into secluded woods was one thing. Sneaking Keith into the most popular tourist trap in the city? Not possible.

“Well, there’s always the Big Dipper,” Lance chuckled anyway. “You’d like that one better anyway cause you’re an adrenaline junkie. Speaking of which, Dipper’s okay, right Keith? He got away?”

“He’s fine, yeah. Also, I should’ve known the orca was coming up on us when all the other seals bolted like that. But, Dipper stayed, so I didn’t think... Idiot,” Keith added softly, shaking his head at the memory.

“Aw, he probably just wanted to protect you,” Hunk cooed.

“Nah, he’s just gotten used to _me_ protecting _him_ ,” Keith snorted. “He’s not afraid of anything anymore.”

“Relatable,” Lance said, and slowed down from 45 mph to 25, recognizing the hints that their turnoff was coming up soon. There would be no road sign for it; it was just a clearing they’d found by chance the day Hunk got his driver’s license that was conveniently close to the road while also being hidden from passing cars, and so they’d kept coming back. Keith sat up again as Lance slowed to a crawl in order to pull off the road, dipping downward in a brief slope before turning, leaving the car hidden from the road by stacked earth and exposed tree roots. Pidge was already out of the car before Lance had fully stopped, ignoring his indignant shout, and by the time he’d taken his keys out of the ignition she was already digging around through the trunk for their emergency supplies—AKA snacks and blankets. Lance climbed into the back to help Hunk extract Keith while Pidge made their clearing into temporary stargazing-central by spreading all the blankets out on the damp soil, kicking underbrush out of the way as she went.

Lance threw himself down beside Keith as soon as he was settled, arms locked behind his head. “It’s nice, right?”

“It’s more than nice,” Keith replied emphatically. “This place is like a dream world.”

Because of the steep slope of the mountainside, you could see the city lights from here, peeking through the tree trunks in patches of vivid white and gold, and the dark hint of the ocean beyond it where the lights suddenly stopped. Far, far above them, the starry sky peeked in misshapen patches through the towering canopy. The Redwoods pressed in close on all sides of the clearing, the biggest of which was so thick around at the base that it might’ve taken Lance, Hunk, and Pidge together to reach all the way around its circumference. As much as Lance loved the ocean, he loved the forest almost as much. Coming here felt like warping into an ancient and mystical place, where the world without was vaguely intangible and nothing that happened inside counted; a pocket dimension lost in time. Most of these trees were older than everyone in this city, and likewise, the trees would outlive them all too by hundreds of years. Instead of being depressing, that thought was strangely comforting. Being in this place made him feel the same way that looking up at the stars did—like it was okay to just exist, small and insignificant, knowing that there was already something out there much bigger and more significant than he would ever be, because (even if it was only for a brief moment in time) he was a _part_ of it.

In that sense, it made Lance feel like his existence was a lot more remarkable than it actually was.

On Lance’s other side Pidge and Hunk were getting comfortable, throwing snacks at each other, a few of which hit Lance and fell on Keith. “Thank you for taking me here,” Keith told them softly, picking up the pack of gushers Pidge had thrown.

“Any time,” Pidge said before ripping open and dumping a full pack of gushers into her mouth.

“Gross,” Hunk pointed. “But yeah, what she said. Any time. You're part of the squad now, Keith.”

“Squad?”

“Yeah. You know, the official friend group. Like a family, kinda, but one that you pick yourself.”

“Oh,” Keith said, his voice small and thick with emotion. “Huh. I've.. never really had one of those before.”

Lance turned over and saw that strained look on Keith's face, his jaw set, and he was doing that thing where he rubbed his thumb over his knuckles together as a distraction when he was trying not to get emotional. Before he could really think about it Lance reached out and threaded his fingers through Keith’s, clearing his throat and averting his gaze when Keith looked over at him questioningly. “So anyway, apparently I’ve neglected to teach Keith about constellations,” he said. “Maybe we should’ve invited Matt. He’s got like, encyclopedic knowledge of space stuff,” he told Keith. “It’s awesome.”

“We stan one nerdy boy,” Hunk agreed.

“What?”

“He doesn’t get memes,” Lance told Hunk.

“You haven’t shown him memes?” Pidge shrieked, leaning over Hunk with her face aghast.

“I’ve _shown_ him them,” Lance defended his honor haughtily, “I said he doesn’t _get_ them.”

“I get them,” Keith bristled. “I just don’t see why they’re necessary. Can’t you just say what you mean? Why do you have to use weird pictures and phrases and code words? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I rest my case,” Lance said. “He doesn’t get them.”

“Lance, I swear to god— Hey!”

Lance cackled as he shook the last of the water from the bottle he’d just upended on Keith’s head. “Gotta stay hydrated, babe.”

He lovingly smeared the water down over Keith’s gills, but Keith slapped his hand away and it quickly turned into a brief water fight where three more of the five water bottles they’d brought from the car ended up on Lance, Keith, and the blanket. Hunk confiscated the last one, and once they’d settled down again he demanded a brief lesson in constellations from Pidge, who, as Matt’s younger sister and obsessive consumer of space and alien shows, was the designated honorary expert. So they all laid back and let Pidge try to pick out what constellations she could from the part of the night sky that was visible to them… which turned out to be exactly zero, which Lance found absolutely hilarious. But apparently, that reddish star near the canopy line was Mars, which amazed Keith and totally made up for the lack of constellations.

“OH! Shooting star!” Hunk blurted when they’d been laying there for over an hour, pointing straight upward. “Make a wish, everyone! I wish that Lance told me about mermaids six years ago.”

“Hey! It’s not my fault! I did it for love!”

“I wish Lance was subtler,” Pidge chimed in, “‘cause this is seriously embarrassing, even for him.”

“I wish you guys were nicer to me in front of the boy I like,” Lance huffed. “You're supposed to like, talk me up and stuff! You guys suck!”

“Whatever,” Pidge snorted. “He's known you since you were ten. That means he knew you during your Naruto phase, so there's nothing me or Hunk can do at this point to make you look cool.”

“…Fair. That’s fair. You guys still suck, though. Keith, what do you wish for?” he redirected, letting his head fall to the side toward Keith, only to see that Keith wasn’t looking at the sky anymore at all. He was gazing off into the black forest, his eyes hidden by the curve of his cheek. He had one arm outstretched toward it, falling into the layer of crunchy leaves that covered the ground, and was poking at a tiny sapling which was peeking up from between them. A baby Redwood, only a few inches tall. Keith took one of its hair-thin branches between his fingers, careful not to break it. “Keith?”

“I wish I was human,” Keith whispered, and for the first time in his life, Lance felt his heart break.

“Oh,” Lance breathed.

This was the first time Keith had ever ever _ever_ mentioned something like that. Sensing that Keith had just let something deeply personal slip by accident, Lance sat up, trying to get a better look at his face.

“Keith…?”

Hastily, like he was emerging from sleep, Keith retracted his hand from Lance’s in order to wipe at his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Hey, you guys wanna go grab some more water?” Lance asked Hunk and Pidge, who were already sitting up as well.

“Yep,” Hunk said and promptly pulled Pidge around to the far side of the car across the clearing to give them a minute alone.

“Subtle,” Keith grumbled. He was clearly embarrassed but he still allowed Lance to pull him up into a sitting position as well so they were directly eye-to-eye.

“Dude, it's okay,” Lance soothed. “Sometimes I wish I was a mer too, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sometimes. And I… sometimes I wish you were human too,” he admitted, also for the first time ever. If only Keith knew how often and how long and how deeply he’d dwelt on that impossible pipedream. “But it's okay. _We're_ okay,” he added more pointedly, leveling a serious look at Keith, brushing his knuckles on his jawline. “I know we haven’t had time to talk about this yet,” he murmured. “Us. What it means or how we’d ever make it work. But I’m serious about you, Keith. And I know there’s never gonna be a sea witch or a potion or some sort of convenient magic spell that gives you legs, but we _will_ make it work, alright? I promise.”

Instead of looking reassured by this, Keith closed his eyes as if Lance's words were causing him great pain. “This is a stupid idea,” he said. “You and me.”

“Yeah,” Lance agreed, yet he didn’t remove his hand. “But it was your stupid idea, and you _know_ how I love your stupid ideas.”

Keith melted a little, eyes cracking open. “Yeah.”

Allowing himself a small smile, Lance leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of Keith’s mouth. He felt Keith begin to smile back, and then, a waterfall of cold water interrupted them.

“HEY!” Lance spluttered indignantly, smacking the now half-empty bottle out of Pidge’s hand.

“You said to get some water,” Pidge said, her voice oversaturated with innocence, the little goblin. “Well, here you go.”

“You did say that,” Keith grinned.

“God, why do I like you,” Lance complained loudly. “You're gonna side with Pidge forever, aren't you?”

“Yes,” Pidge hissed, fist-pumping the air, “team Peith versus team Lunk, fight to the death!”

Keith blinked up at her. “What?”

“More memes. Just ignore her,” Lance advised, but Keith didn’t ignore her. In fact, Pidge settled next to Keith this time around, and Hunk stretched out lengthwise by all of their heads, and they both made a point of keeping Keith thoroughly engaged in the conversation. For that, Lance was grateful, because that sad, far-off expression stayed out of his eyes for the rest of the night, and after a few hours he got so tired that he fell fast asleep, curled toward Lance with his head tucked into the crook of Lance’s shoulder.

Lance sighed as soon as he noticed Keith was for sure asleep, then reached blindly behind him for another water bottle. He had to bat away a few empty ones before his hand came to rest on one that was still cold and heavy; there were only a few left now so they were running out of time and would have to leave soon, lest Keith start taking damage. It had felt like so much water, back when he filled these up down at the beach. But now... it seemed grossly inadequate, considering how far from the ocean they'd taken Keith, and how badly he'd be hurt if they got stuck out here with a blown tire or something, and how much of the water they'd wasted playing around. Uncapping the one he’d grabbed, he poured it on Keith slow enough so as not to wake him yet, drawing out these last few moments as long as he could, making sure to wet every fin and especially his gills. Then, when the bottle was empty, he craned his neck to look at Hunk and Pidge, who’d recently fallen quiet. He was going to point out that they were running low on water and suggest that they start packing up, but he was surprised to find them both already staring at him. Suddenly he felt self-conscious, knowing they'd seen that. He wasn't used to there being witnesses of his feelings for Keith. The outside perspective made it more real, somehow, even more real than kissing Keith had done. Dangerously real.

“Dude,” Hunk said.

“You are so fucked,” Pidge added, not unkindly.

Lance swallowed thickly. “Yeah.”

He was.

He really, really was.

The sky was turning periwinkle by the time they woke Keith up and loaded him back in the car to drive down the mountain. Lance drove 10mph over the speed limit on the way back since he was now racing the sun and they only had one bottle of water left. Keith sat in the front passenger seat this time around, and all the way back he watched the woods waking up to the morning. He hung in a state of even quieter meditation than he did on the ride up. Out of the corner of his eye, Lance observed the silent reverence Keith held for the human world, and he thought about the habit Keith had of laying out on the rocks outside the grotto, watching planes as they crossed the sky far above. When they were younger Keith used to sigh and wonder aloud about what kind of bird his mom had turned into, because he was too young to remember when it happened, and his father never told him before he died. Lance had always thought that whole story was insane, the thing about his mom and the bird, and sometimes he said so, but even as a child he had usually just let Keith have it. It was the one thing Lance had never had the heart to argue with him about.

 _Do you ever wish you could become a bird too?_ Lance had asked once when they were twelve. Just the once, because Keith's response had been to throw a rock at the seagull who'd been inching closer and closer to him for the last few minutes, startling it into flight, at which point he'd said  _no_ with cold, sharp certainty.

But then he’d said something else, too. Something which Lance had never thought too hard about.

(Until now. Until today, as Keith watched the city go by in a blur with one hand on the door handle and unconcealable desire in his eyes.)

He’d looked up at the sky, where a plane was currently passing near the sun, the sound of its engines carrying down through clouds and out across the ocean. Lance had to shield his eyes just to see it there. _No,_ he’d repeated, _but… sometimes I wish I could fly, though._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so lance thinks hes insignificant in the grand scheme of things and keith just wants to be human... liek if u cri evertim. :( shoutout to my own bf for pulling a lance on me when we were 16 and dropping the first i love you of our relationship as a ‘love you, goodnight’ as casually as fucking possible (over TEXT) and leaving me to freak out and panic about it all night on the phone to my best friend (even though she only lived three houses away asjdhfkj), which is UNDOUBTEDLY what keith did—and by that i mean he unloaded his confusion on dipper out in the harbor the second lance left the grotto to go get pidge and hunk lmao.
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> eyyy so if you like this story pls consider sharing it! i'm not so great at advertising i guess but i'm putting a metric ton of work into writing this so yeah klhdkhsdkj please and thx and to everyone reading and commenting so far, your comments are the breath in my lungs
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> [tumblr](https://speakswords.tumblr.com/post/182832582456/where-the-water-meets-the-sky-childhood-friends)  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speak_swords/status/1096533900212367360)


	4. The Aquarium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [view from the monterey bay aquarium balcony](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hw58TY7xNGE/UWGYjJaT4HI/AAAAAAAAOPE/QC3FlPpYuy0/s1600/IMG_6919.JPG)   
>  [more mb aquarium (kelp forest exhibit)](https://www.momspumphere.com/components/com_jplaces/files/images/1698782122monterey-bay-aquarium_nursing-mothers-room-pic2.jpg)
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> btw the reason i havent posted hidden beach pics is because although i have vivid childhood memories of hidden beach, i was unable to locate it as an adult going back so maybe i imagined it lol

Leandro Socorro Lacoste-McClain was in love with the ocean. And, in a manner of speaking, the ocean loved him back. Every day when he woke up he would lie there for a minute, wrapping his head around this fact once again for the new day.

Sometimes the remembering came softly. Sleep-heavy eyes would land on the red spiny seashell where he kept it on his nightstand, and his _don't-wanna-be-awake-yet_ agitation would explode into cottony fluff that filled his chest to bursting.

But sometimes?

Sometimes it hit him like a train. Sometimes he'd wake up directly from a dream about Keith (vague and nebulous thought-image-sensation, the way dreams were, but so heavy, so tactile, so _lingering_ ) and he'd have to slam his pillow over his face and whisper-scream all the emotions that were too big to fit inside him anymore. Because what the hell. What the actual hell. His life had gone and become a fairytale when he wasn't looking. _Okay_ , well, it wasn't exactly rated E for Everyone... but yeah. Usually these morning whisper-screams of disbelief would happen after those nights where he stayed out with Keith into the early hours of the morning, so late and so laden with teenage guilt as he snuck back into his house that he'd begun to climb in through his window. Better to scratch himself up on the rose bush outside his window than chance running into someone who got up for a midnight glass of water or something. On the surface level, if he was ever caught sneaking in at 4:30am with his shirt untucked, he knew what this looked like. It looked like your average tryst.

But by _god_ , was it anything but.

Like, yeah, Lance couldn't exactly take his boyfriend to Winter Formal, but uhh he wasn't complaining. Not when it was _Keith._ Not when Keith's idea of the best date ever was cold takeout spaghetti eaten together blindly under the wharf at midnight. Not when Keith's version of bringing Lance flowers was gathering enough pieces of sea glass to cover one of the lanterns and turn the walls of the grotto into a muted rainbow dreamscape. Not when every time they kissed Keith somehow made it feel like it was both the first and last time. The way Keith kissed him, it made him feel like they were meant to be together forever.

Yeah, yeah, so they were only seventeen. But they were also _already_ seventeen. And Lance was a romantic. Maybe they'd only been 'together’ for a short while, but they'd known each other for years, and Lance was certain he'd never in all his life love anyone else as much as he loved Keith. So, was it too early to say they were soulmates? Or was it predestined? Signed in blood by Poseidon or something?

“Yes it's too early, no there's no such thing as destiny, and no Poseidon isn't real,” Pidge informed him with no qualms, at which point Lance rolled over and stretched his legs out, effectively kicking her off his bed.

“You don't know that,” he teased. “A few months ago you didn't even believe in mermaids!”

“So what I’m getting out of this is that you believe in Poseidon now,” Hunk noted.

“No, I'm telling you that I think me and Keith are soulmates and you're both intentionally dodging it!” If mer were real, why couldn't soulmates be real? Where was the line in the sand, exactly? Couldn't it just be wherever he wanted it to be if it was making him happy? Lance tried to kick Hunk off the bed too for good measure, but he was just too dense, and the battle was lost as soon as Hunk grabbed his ankle.

“Lance,” Hunk said, and Lance knew by that tone that he wasn’t gonna like whatever came next. He tried to get his leg back but Hunk held on. “You know what they say about the fish falling in love with the bird, right?”

“Hunk,” Pidge warned, peeking up over the edge of the bed now, eyes trained on Lance's carefully blank face.

“Nope, not familiar with it,” Lance hummed, opting to jam his foot into Hunk's ribs, to at least be an annoyance if he couldn't shove him off. “Is it that they were soulmates? Oh, they are, you say?” he went on before Hunk had a chance to reply, “how cute. Ten out of ten. GREAT story, Hunk.”

“That's not—”

“Hu-uunk,” Pidge complained, “we talked about this.”

“Why do I always have to be the bad guy,” Hunk grumbled. “I just don't wanna see you get hurt, man.”

He wasn’t gonna, though! Like, okay. He definitely understood what Hunk was getting at, here, he just... vehemently disagreed with everything about it on a fundamental level. That's all. “Look, I hear you, big guy.” Lance relented, unable to keep up his jokey facade when Hunk looked so worried and ruffled. “But can’t we just, like.. _not_ think about that?”

It was just easier for him that way.

...Easier for Keith, too, maybe.

Lance had always been a good friend; he prided himself on that. Or at least, he _thought_ he was a good friend. More than anything else, he’d prided himself on getting Keith to open up to him over the years, especially after all the resistance he put up along the way. But he never stopped to consider that maybe there were still things Keith hadn't opened up about. Big things. At least, until Keith let it slip.

The ‘I wish I was human.’

That thing.  

After that first night in the Redwoods, Lance paid a little more attention to the things Keith _didn't_ say. Did it really bother him that much, being a mer? Did he really wish he could leave the ocean for good? Why didn't he ever say anything?

The thought saddened Lance. He'd always known Keith had no special love of the ocean, at least not in the way that Lance did, but he never could've guessed he'd actually willingly leave it if given the option. But once Lance was made aware, he did see it. He couldn't _un_ see it.

It hung like half-full rainclouds over Keith's face whenever Lance left the grotto; Keith wasn't just bummed Lance was leaving as he'd once thought, Keith was bummed that _he_ had to _stay_. It also crept up in moments when Lance was least expecting it. More than once he caught Keith staring at his tail when he thought Lance wasn't looking, eyebrows cinched in a sharp V, jaw squared, shoulders taut with tension, hands curling into fists against the wet stone. And Lance would peter out in whatever story he was telling or joke he was butchering, and Keith would be so concentrated that he wouldn't even notice. Just glaring at his tail. And then, in a fit of frustration, he would slap it against the stone or the water or whatever he was sitting on and snap himself out of it.

Only to do it again the next day.

And the next.

Jesus, how long had Keith been feeling like this silently? What was Lance even supposed to do about it?

It's not like he could take him to a professional to talk it out or something. And the thing was, Lance couldn’t be much help in this because he simply couldn't relate. Back in the Redwoods, he’d told Keith he wished he was a mer sometimes. And it was true, in a sense, but… at the same time, he didn’t think he could ever actually _give up_ his legs. There were about forty million things he’d have to give up along with them, and he didn’t think he would ever do that even if it was somehow magically possible. If a sea witch popped up and offered him the trade-off, he would have to politely decline. Maybe his answer would've been different back when he was a kid, but the older he got, the more he thought about his career, and the more he knew he was gonna make good on that childhood promise to save the ocean. He wanted to make it a better place for people like Keith, and he had to do that from land.

Besides, he loved being human. And he was happy with Keith the way they were, anyway, so why would he wish for anything else? If he had it his way, nothing about their relationship would _ever_ change. If this was just what the rest of their lives was like, he would grow old and die happy coming down to the grotto every day.

_A fish may fall in love with a bird, but where would they live?_

‘Right here’ was okay by Lance. He'd make it work.

As for Keith...

He couldn’t give Keith legs. He could only give him his heart and hope it was enough.

 

**. . .**

 

After that day in the Redwoods, Keith didn’t mention The Thing again, and all Lance could do was hope that someday that particular heartache passed. After all, it was a problem with no solution, and the only way to deal with a problem like that was to just learn how to live with it.

It wasn't too hard to let it stay out of sight and out of mind since they were busy being absolutely disgustingly in love at every given opportunity.

Now that he and Keith were an actual item, so to speak, it was doubly hard to keep him a secret from the family. His half-hearted rebuttals to the “Leandro is in love with the ocean” joke rang hollower than ever. It was such an ingrained family joke that it's what his parents told his father’s parents on one of their Saturday morning video calls over their  _café con leche_. They simply loved to ask when Lance was going to bring home a girlfriend as lovely as Marco’s high school sweetheart Jessica, who he'd moved in with this year.

“The ocean is a little busy, and couldn't come by for a social call,” Mamá joked.

Long accustomed to that joke, Lance simply laughed, and shrugged, and told them, “Yeah, the ocean was busy this weekend but I'll try to bring ‘em around to meet the family someday.” Even in the throwaway joke, he was very careful not to say _her_ , but no one seemed to notice, anyway. On the screen, his grandparents laughed so hard that they nearly spilled their coffee on their laptop keyboard, and so did his siblings—all except Laura.

When Lance's eyes fell on Laura he froze. She was staring at him with narrowed eyes, from the other side of the dining room table, a dangerously critical expression descending over her. “Hey, Lance?” she asked suddenly, but it was quiet enough that no one else in the family paid her any mind as they continued on their conversation.

“...Yes?” he squeaked. He _really_ didn't like the look on her face. It was too calculating. _Oh my god, she knows. She knows._

She seemed to register his panic, and backed off, letting her eyes fall down to her lap where she was wringing her hands. “Nevermind,” she said, and Lance counted himself lucky.

Maybe she didn't know after all.

(But she did. She did know.)

It didn't come to a head until they were playing Call of Duty one night in December, and he confessed that he hadn’t asked anyone to Winter Formal yet, and wasn’t planning to. That he wasn't really interested in going to it with anyone at their high school anyway.

“Of course not,” she replied blithely, “because you’re already in love with someone else who doesn't go there.”

He shrugged. Maybe it was because he was so used to those jokes, and he was so tired and invested in the game that he forgot the brief scare where he was sure Laura had figured him out. It was only when the game paused that he looked over at her. “What?”

“You’re not gonna deny it half-heartedly like usual?” she joked.

“Oh. Uh…” The room was dark but the CoD pause menu had her face carved out in gradients of gray, had her chestnut eyes shining silver with potential understanding. “No,” he found himself saying. “I guess not.”

The game remained paused. Lance and Laura were probably the most different of all the Socorro-McClain siblings. But they were also the closest in age, Laura being not even a full year younger than him, and subsequently, they were also the closest. They were at each other's throats more often than not, they were endlessly different (Lance with his unyielding certainty that he was gonna become a marine biologist, Laura with her erratic flip-flopping between surgeon, philanthropist, psychologist, President...) and yet, they were the best of friends. It had always been like that. When they were kids people had often mistaken them for twins. Sometimes they still did; they had that television-esque twin telepathy where they sometimes had the same song stuck in their head for no reason, where they independently bought the same jacket without realizing it, and where they knew exactly what the other was thinking without them having to speak. That was why Lance had always known Laura saw more in the Keith situation than she was letting on. That she had never really been talking about the ocean.

“Leandro, can I ask you something?”

The controller was suddenly very heavy in his hands. He fiddled with the cord, willing himself not to visibly shrink inward. “What?” As if he didn’t know what she was gonna ask.

When she didn’t speak for almost a full minute he forced himself to look over at her. It was then that he realized how nervous she was. She was biting her nails even though she’d quit that habit last year, and staring down at the blanket with her face screwed up in concentration. Shit, this was probably harder for her than it was for him. If he knew her, she'd been working up the courage to ask him for a while now. She tended to simmer on things for a long time before acting on them all at once impulsively.

Kinda like someone else Lance knew.

 _Bite the bullet_. Lance dropped his controller onto the bedspread for good, leaned back into her pillows, and gave a long, suffering sigh. “Uuhghg _hgugghhh_ okay, okay, his name’s _Keith_ , okay? Are you happy now, you psychological sorceress?”

Silence.

The silence went on long enough for Lance to second-guess his decision, but when he took a shuddery breath and prepared to defend himself, Laura burst into life.

“Me too!” she yelled, pouncing across the bed at him, and he blinked up at her in abject surprise.

“What?”

“Wait, sorry,” she backtracked, “that was—shoot, lemme back up, I’m so happy for you and proud of you and _so glad_ you found the courage to tell me when I’ve been an absolute coward about it this whole time and _me too_ , Lance!” She had begun vigorously shaking his shoulders through the last half of that, driving Lance to laughter even through his confusion. Because seriously, _what?_

“You’re in love with a guy named Keith too?”

“No, _no_ , _por supuesto que no,_ ” she laughed, “no I mean.. I um.” She sat back on her haunches, allowing him to sit up again. “I mean that I like girls. Guys too, but.. girls are like…” she threw her hands up and ended the confession with an erratic shrug. “I’m bi.”

 _“Oh,”_ Lance breathed.

“Yeah.” The grin on her face was off the charts. “I’ve known since I was like ten, you have no idea how much it’s—actually I guess you do,” she corrected. “I’m sorry,” she laughed, “I’m just really happy not to feel so friggin’ alienated anymore. Can I tell you about the girl I like? She’s straight and it’s pretty much the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“ _Obviously_ ,” he agreed, somewhat giddy over this news. “Can I gush about Keith too?”

“Obviously,” she parroted, and then threw herself down on the bed, where they talked about their crushes until dawn like they were kids at sleepovers again and love was all that mattered in the world. He didn't even realize how alone he’d felt until suddenly he wasn't. Until there was someone to share his unique experiences with, and his frustrations, and his hope, and his happiness. Someone who understood. He thought about Pidge and Hunk, and how happy meeting them had made Keith, how happy coming clean to Hunk and Pidge had felt. How good it felt to open up to Laura and have her open up in return.

How bad would it be if more people knew, anyway? If he could trust anyone with his deepest secrets it should be his family, right?

“Are you gonna tell everyone else?” Laura whispered when the sky began to lighten through the crack in her curtains.

“Soon,” Lance confessed. “Are you?”

“Soon.”

“We could tell them together,” Lance offered. “Just.. don’t mention anything about Keith yet, okay?”

“Keith, Keith, Keith,” she joked. “Man, what _is it_ about this guy that you have to keep him such a mystery?”

“You’ll see when you meet him.”

To which Laura replied, “And when will that be?”

And Lance said, with a thrill of excitement at the prospect of introducing Keith to his family, “Soon.”

But ‘soon’ stayed at an indefinite distance. Lance and Laura came out together to the family as casually as possible (okay, so they baked a rainbow confetti cake and iced it with the words “surprise, we're both bi lol” on it, and couldn’t stop making jokes the whole time, and almost cried laughing through the process). But when they asked if there was anyone in particular they'd been hiding from the family, he let Laura vent loudly about her unrequited crush and when it was his turn he said, “Nope, not me. Not yet,” and turned away from their questioning stares.

Just a bit more time. That was all he needed! He just wanted to savor this stretch of time where he and Keith were dating before he had to submit to Parental Boyfriend Rules.

The second half of junior year came upon him like a waking dream. It was a fireworks show in his head, every time he was with Keith, and a smoky haze every time he was away. But now, with Hunk and Pidge in on the secret, he got to spend more time with Keith than ever before, because he didn't have to split his time between them as much. Half their junior weeknights were spent down in that grotto, the four of them sprawled out on blankets, fighting over pizza slices, yelling over video games, helping each other with their homework, sabotaging each other's homework, pushing Keith into the water when he got their homework wet _again_ , like, seriously Keith, Lance needed to pass AP Bio if he wanted to get into AP Marine Bio next year, so that he’d be eligible for an internship with the SLRC the year after _that_ , and he _wasn't_ sure how many times Ms. Reinke would accept 'I dropped it in the bath’ as an excuse.

The idea of introducing Keith to his family hung always at the back of his brain, planted long ago, now beginning to sprout into something that was growing too big to ignore, something that couldn’t be contained indefinitely.

The idea was less scary than it was before. It was exciting now. Almost relieving, too, because if his family knew about Keith then they would understand his decision to stay and go to college here in Santa Cruz rather than trying for an Ivy League school the way they dreamed. As of now, the only one in the family who knew he wasn’t even applying to out-of-town universities was Laura, so he was under constant stress. Secrets, secrets, so many secrets.

Honestly, he was simply tired of keeping all these secrets. It felt so _good_ coming out. He wanted them to know the rest too. And, moreover, he wanted Keith to have a family. The guy’s parents died when he was just a kid, and the closest thing he’d had to family since then was a friendly fisherman who’d loosely adopted him for a year before disappearing forever. Lance had tried to track down this Shiro guy many times since he and Keith met, but his efforts always turned up empty. And if Lance couldn’t bring Keith’s mom and dad back from the dead, couldn’t find his extended mer family, and couldn’t even find a human who Keith had once considered a brother, then there was only one thing Lance could give Keith, and that was a place in his _own_ family.

So he made up his mind to ask.

It was nearing summer again, and this coming year might very well be the last one where Lance lived right next to the water. Heavy on his mind was the prospect of bringing Beni and Gabi down to the grotto to swim around with Keith, of having Marco down for a jam session with his guitar so Keith could hear him play, of having Keith and Laura gang up on him in arguments, of possibly even bringing Keith up to the house in the dead of night so he could stay the night and be there for the weekly family game-and-movie-thon the next night. They could fill the bathtub with seawater. Hell, Keith could _have_ the guest bathroom as far as Lance was concerned. It could be his indefinitely, for him to stay in whenever they brought him up from the grotto to visit. He could put pictures he loved on the walls and they wouldn’t crust over with rust from airborne salt, and he could keep his things out in the open instead of in airtight tubs, and he could _be there_ sometimes when Lance woke up in the morning.

Now _that_ idea… that was what finally convinced Lance to go for it, late one night on Hidden Beach.

In fact, he had just opened his mouth to ask when Keith beat him to speaking, with a much more panicked and blurted question than the one Lance had been stewing on for weeks.

“Are you going to apply to any out-of-town universities, like Hunk and Pidge?”

The splash of a wave punctuated his question. The steady rush and release of the water was such a familiar cadence that Lance almost didn’t even hear it anymore, even when everything else was silent. It was part of the landscape.

Keith had never had a rounded concept of what college really was until Hunk and Pidge started coming around. Lance had always kept it vague because he didn’t want Keith to think there was a chance Lance was leaving him, and he also didn’t want Keith to know he was sacrificing something pretty significant to stay. It was easier that way. But Hunk and Pidge were not privy to the inner machinations of his mind, and they were pretty loudmouthed about their favorite prospective colleges, so he guessed it was only a matter of time before Keith started asking questions.

When the silence stretched on he chanced a glance Keith’s direction, and found him with his head tipped to the side toward Lance, his nearly-dry hair spilling out below him on the sand, eyes wide open and serious.

“No,” Lance finally said. He was gonna kill Hunk and Pidge. Ugh, he had been avoiding this exact conversation because he knew Keith would be all _Keith_ about it.

Right on cue, something shuttered in Keith’s eyes. He shifted, sitting up, and sand cascaded in his wake, out of his hair and off the thin fins lining his lower spine. “Lance, I don’t ever want to hold you back. I know you’re just doing this because I’m here—”

“Oh please, don’t flatter yourself,” Lance joked, but faltered at the dead-serious look Keith leveled at him, his eyes burning, a flash of bioluminescent red alighting across his cheeks. “Okay, well yeah,” he admitted. “But also, no. It’s not like I don’t adore this city. I love it here, and my family lives here, and all my other friends live here too. I’m not exactly tortured over the decision, Keith.”

“Still,” Keith muttered. “If you ever wanted to leave…”

“Keith.” Lance sat up too, taking Keith’s face firmly in hand and forcing him to look into his eyes. It was only then that Lance saw how truly upset Keith was about this. “Keith, I’m not leaving. Ever.”

Keith’s hands fumbled over Lance’s, his eyes half-lidded and glistening. “Ever is a really long time.”

 _“Ever,”_ Lance reiterated with conclusive emphasis, leaving no room for argument. “Got it?”

Their foreheads came into contact and Keith sighed, long and deep: the universal sign that he was losing the argument. “Got it,” he relented, and Lance smiled even though it didn’t sound like Keith fully believed him, scratching gently at his hair above the nape of Keith’s neck.

“I mean, hey,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood again, “if you really want me to get out of the city, maybe you could just turn into a bird and come with.”

Keith’s eyebrows furrowed, and Lance wondered if he’d made a grave mistake joking about that. Keith liked dark humor, so he thought it was okay, but maybe not. But then, before he could apoligize, “I told you,” Keith said, a tsunami of determination welling up behind his eyes, spilling over, lighting them up gold from the inside of his irises out, burying every ounce of shy uncertainty that had plagued him and replacing it with liquid fire. “I _told_ you, I don’t want to be a bird, I want to be _human_.”

“Keith,” Lance stammered, shocked at the outburst since Keith had only admitted that once in his life, that night in the Redwoods. Shocked because they hadn't spoken of it since. Before he’d even really decided what to say, Keith surged forward without preamble and kissed him.

The kiss went from zero to Mach 5 in one second flat, and he made a weak, muffled questioning noise into Keith’s mouth as Keith’s hands buried into his hair, but ultimately lost the battle and just went with it despite his utter confusion. His eyelids fluttered closed. It was only when Keith pulled back sharply that he remembered what started this and tried to address it again. But Keith interrupted him before he’d even gotten a word out this time. “Shut up,” Keith breathed out, not in anger, but more in sheer desperation. It was more a plea than a command. “Just shut up for a sec. Let me try something, okay?”

“O-oka—” Lance tried to say, but again was cut off when Keith sealed their lips together.

He didn’t know what was happening, but Keith was clearly a man on a mission. Whereas he was normally somewhat shy about kissing, any and all trepidation had flown out the window. Lance’s stomach bottomed out at the sheer determination with which Keith was coming at him, no cares at all for where they were. They usually tried not to kiss here at the beach because it was so easy to get lost in each other, to forget that they were supposed to be keeping an eye out and making sure they weren’t seen.

This was why. Lance was fucking _lost_ in it. The beach might as well have been a thousand miles away from them. All Lance knew was the heat of Keith’s breath, the slide of his tongue, the gossamer silk of his fins as he flopped his tail over onto Lance’s bare legs, as he pushed into Lance’s space and kept coming, kept pushing in until Lance was nearly falling over with the weight of him. It was almost like Keith was _trying_ to get them lost. It felt like he’d taken Lance by the hand and sprinted into the forest, away from the path and into the tangled underbrush. As if in reply to that thought, Keith broke away. But only for a second. Only long enough to shove Lance down onto the sand and roll over on top of him, his eyes burning hazel. Now that Lance’s eyes were open again he saw that Keith was practically on fire. He hadn’t seen so many of his scales lit up like this since the day he chased off that orca. He brought his hand up Keith’s side, watching the flicker of lights follow and fade.

“Focus,” Keith whispered, and came down on Lance’s lips again. Lance’s hands found Keith’s jaw and he pushed him away by a centimeter, finally relenting to the volley of confusion.

“Focus on _what?_ ” he asked breathlessly.

“‘m not talking to you,” Keith answered. “Shh.”

“ _O_ -kay,” Lance answered, a bit sassier this time. Keith was just being weird now. _Patience yields focus,_ Keith was whispering to himself again as he laid flat on Lance’s chest and moved his mouth to his neck. It was an old personal mantra of Keith’s that Lance recognized, one that Shiro had given him to recite when trying to teach him how to effectively fish with traps and nets while he was still mastering the use of his mom’s knife. Keith was probably the least patient person who had ever lived, so a waiting game like fishing had been a monumental task for him. _Patience yields focus._

“Keith,” Lance tried again, “what the hell are you trying to—”

“Lance, _please_ ,” Keith pleaded into his neck, his breath as hot as the wet sand was cold. “Just shut _up_ for a second!”

Lance’s mouth fell open. Fucking rude!

It didn’t make it any less rude just because Keith went back to sucking on his neck right after saying it, and it didn’t make him any less irritated at Keith’s behavior just because that felt fucking amazing. Fine. If Keith was gonna be like that, then Lance was gonna retaliate. There were more ways to screw with Keith’s focus than just by talking. Sure enough, Keith’s breath hitched when Lance brought his fingers down the center of Keith’s back, tracing the dip of his spine until he got to the dorsal fin that ran vertically there, slowing down, tracing the base of the fin as lightly as he could with the tips of his fingers. He only got about halfway down Keith's back before he broke, his mouth falling away from Lance’s neck and his forehead plopping into the sand above Lance’s shoulder as he tried to keep a weak noise from escaping his throat. Tried, and failed. Lance giggled openly, and Keith _thwapped_ his tail on the sand between Lance’s shins in response to it, scattering flecks of wet sand across his skin.

“Do I have your attention now?” he hummed, turning his head and speaking directly into Keith’s ear, carding his fingers across the length of the fin, pulling and gently straightening it out in much the same way he would Keith’s hair when he was pulling out the tangles for him. He knew Keith liked this even more than he liked that, but he almost never let Lance do it. He usually slapped Lance’s hand away, red in the face and stammering. Not now, though.

“You always have my attention,” Keith grumbled into the sand, and promptly began coughing.

It was a coarse, dry cough, and the sound roused immediate alarm bells. Dropping the dorsal fin, Lance looked down at the delicate gills on Keith’s neck and grimaced. “Shit. Your gills,” he said. They were way, way drier than they ever should be. There was a visible salty edge to them where they’d begun to dry out that looked horribly uncomfortable. Shoot, how long since he’d carried Keith out of the waves to lay down? How long since he’d last splashed water on him?

“It’s fine,” Keith said as the cough subsided, and pushed up onto his elbows, attempting to come back and kiss Lance on the mouth again.

“What?” Lance said incredulously, turning away so that Keith missed. “Um, no, it’s not. Come on, let’s go dip in—”

“No,” Keith said, “it’s _fine_. Just—”

Lance shoved him off, letting him fall flat on his back. “What in the hell has gotten into you?” he snapped, not even bothering to wipe the sand off his arms as he maneuvered into position to pick Keith up. It was a lot easier now that he’d started working out, but it was still a work in progress. Keith was one heavy mofo. “Seriously,” he huffed when he’d finally heaved Keith up into the air and gotten his legs straightened. “What - is - the _deal?_ ” With every word he took a step, careful not to step on Keith’s lowest hanging tailfins.

Keith didn’t answer. He stayed limp and quiet as Lance splashed into the surf, the scales on his sides slowly darkening, the hazel glow too fading out of his eyes and leaving only the deep galactic purple. There was a deep sadness left in its place as well, and Lance just wanted to understand.

“This is never going to work,” Keith whispered, facing determinedly away from Lance, eyes on the dark, unseeable horizon where little yellow dots marked the passage of distant ships.

Lance’s strength failed him then, and he sank to his knees, releasing Keith’s weight into the water. “ _What’s_ never going to work?” he asked quietly. “What, us?”

Because honestly, he couldn’t think what the hell else Keith could possibly have meant by that.

That one word finally brought Keith back to life, though. He flipped over in the water, eyes wide and guilty as he drank in the raw hurt on Lance’s face. “No, no no no,” he blurted, “that’s not what I meant,” he murmured, taking Lance’s hand under the water and squeezing it hard enough to hurt. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?” Lance pressed. “Just tell me what’s going through your head for once. I can’t read your goddamn mind, Keith, and honestly, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

“I can’t,” Keith said, eyes down as he sank low in the water to draw in water through his gills, releasing Lance's hand. “I shouldn’t have brought it up, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Keith!”

“Knowing would just upset you,” Keith pleaded, his voice the faintest, choked whisper. “Please, can we just drop this?”

“I don’t think so,” Lance countered. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d just stumbled into, but he knew he couldn’t let it lie now. It was something big. Something that might swallow them both if they turned their backs on it for too long.

Unfortunately, Keith seemed intent on doing just that.

“Dude, just spit it out,” Lance begged. “Come on!”

“I said _no_ ,” Keith bit back, and when Lance reached forward through the water to pull him close, he ducked underwater to escape his arm, coming up again a few feet farther away.

“Keith,” Lance complained, genuinely wounded this time. That was unnecessary.

Keith didn’t hear him, though. The moment he resurfaced he whipped his head around to face the sea, craning his neck out of the water like he was looking for something, even though it was pitch black out there and all that could be seen on the water were those distant pinprick boat lights. “There’s something out there,” Keith said, suddenly, his tone completely shifted. Like he’d utterly forgotten about the conversation. Like he’d forgotten Lance was even there. “The whales and dolphins are all awake and talking. It sounds like…”

“Okay,” Lance snapped. “Who cares? There’s always something out there. We were kind of in the middle of something, in case you forgot.”

“I’ll be right back,” Keith said, without answering him, without even looking at him.

“What?” But Keith had already dipped underwater before Lance had even properly registered what he said. Wait, _what?_ He lunged forward in the water, trying to find Keith and snag him before he darted away into the waves, but it was useless. There was nothing to grab. Keith was already gone. “Are you _fucking kidding me?_ ” Lance exploded. He cupped his hands, facing the black sea and digging his heels in as the next wave pushed him back toward the shore. “KEITH! God dammit, Keith, come back!”

It was beyond pointless. Keith couldn’t hear him; he was long gone. Freaking _jerk_. Gone off to fight a stupid shark or something when they were in the middle of something important!

Scowling, freezing cold as he retreated from deeper waters, Lance made his way back to the base camp on the beach, pulling his big towel around himself to shiver and wait for Keith to return from his stupid impromptu field trip to get a new shark tooth or whatever the fuck, so he could give him a piece of his mind. But the hour hand on his watch ticked past the one, and the two, and the three, and Keith didn’t return. Maybe Lance was in denial, but it wasn’t until the sky began to glow in the east that it dawned on him that Keith wasn’t coming back.

 

**. . .**

 

Needless to say, Lance was furious.

It didn’t help that his parents were both awake when he got in, and he had to pretend like he’d gone out for a sunrise surf in March like some kind of lunatic to cover up the fact that he’d been out all night. He took a shower so hot it probably burned the outermost layer of his skin off and tried to go to bed, since it was a Saturday, but couldn’t fall asleep for the life of him. Not with the sunlight streaming in his window and his mind bogged down with _‘what in the hell even just happened.’_ Try as he might, he couldn’t even begin to understand what had come over Keith, and why he’d flat out refused to talk about it, and why he’d made up an excuse to run away instead of just staying and talking it out. His heart was lead weighted, and he ended up tagging along with Laura and her friends on their weekly Fall Creek hike just to get away from his own head for a while.

Unfortunately, he was a fool in love, and he couldn’t stay away for long. So when it neared 4pm, he swallowed his pride and went down to the grotto. He was still pissed, _obviously_ , but it was better to nip it in the bud before it blew up into something ridiculous. They hadn’t had a major blowout fight since before the orca incident, and Lance wasn’t exactly eager to have their first.

But it was clear, as soon as Lance entered, that Keith wasn’t here. In fact, it looked like he hadn’t been here since before they went to Hidden Beach yesterday, because everything was exactly as they’d left it. That was.. weird. Lance leaned out over the lake, shining his phone flashlight into it. It didn’t look like Keith’s woven seaweed bed had been slept in at all. It was easy to tell because several of Keith’s pet starfish had taken up residence there overnight. There were so slow-moving it would’ve taken them way more than a few hours to cross the whole lake floor. Anxiety squirmed deep in Lance’s stomach, slippery and unwelcome, like an electric eel emerging from a crack in the rocks. Why didn’t Keith sleep here? He always slept here. _Always_.

Well, except when they were fighting.

They weren’t fighting, though.

...Were they?

It was futile, but Lance climbed out of the grotto and down to the rocks where the ocean splashed against them anyway, and called Keith’s name intermittently for an hour or so before giving up and going home. He was probably worried for nothing, anyway. Keith was just being Keith. He would come back when he was done stewing on about whatever he was stewing about, and life would go on. Somehow.

But Keith didn’t come back that night. Nor did he come back on Sunday, and by Sunday night Lance was something of a wreck.

Because this? This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t just Keith being Keith. Even when they were fighting, and Keith didn’t want to see Lance, he _always_ came back. He would leave small signs in the grotto (a moved book, a new piece of pretty harbor trash in the lake, some candle wax on the table melted in the shape of a rude gesture if he was feeling particularly spicy) to show that he'd been there even if he didn't want to see Lance that day. To remind Lance that even though he was mad, he hadn’t gone away for good. And even though Lance was usually just as furious and stubborn, these little signs meant the world to him, and they were usually a large factor in the two of them eventually making up.

But there were no signs, this time. Keith was just _gone_.

“Lance, everything’s gonna be fine,” Hunk soothed, patting his back as he and Pidge prepared to go home for the night, having camped out with Lance in the grotto for the last five straight hours waiting for Keith to come back. “He’s just being moody or something.”

“But what if something happened to him,” Lance argued, struggling not to cry. He kept remembering the strange lilt to Keith’s voice when he said _there’s something out there._ He’d assumed it was just an excuse to get away from the conversation Lance was trying to have with him, but now... “I wouldn’t even know,” he whispered. It’s not like he could go looking for him, and that had never been more frustrating and scary than it was now.

“Maybe we should stay a while longer,” Hunk whispered to Pidge.

“It’s okay,” Lance said. “It’s fine, we have school tomorrow, you guys need to sleep.”

“So do you,” Pidge pointed out.

“I’m ditching,” Lance said, eyes glued to the thin slice of moonlight on the still, empty lake, and nothing Hunk or Pidge said was able to sway him from it.

That night he fell asleep on the hard cave floor to the hushed lullaby of the wind outside, stretched out on a blanket near the edge of the water, still waiting for Keith to come back, and dreamt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The shape of this place was comfortable and familiar; a deeply seeded nostalgia, like a passed-down painting hung above a fireplace. Like a childhood friend.

Keith was in every exhibit.

Lance walked through the aquarium alone, through groups of faceless tourists who spoke in garbled words, and Keith followed along beside him on the other side of the blue glass. Ethereal. Mute. In the kelp forest exhibit he meandered through the swaying towers of leafy brown kelp, flitting between the disconnected tanks with ease, and Lance didn’t stop to question how he did it. He was in the otter exhibit too, and in with the penguins, unbothered by the arctic temperature of the water. In the jellyfish exhibit his scales lit up, outshining all the deep sea jellies in their midnight cages by a million watts, showering the glass and the aquarium walls with roaming prismatic rainbows. He blended perfectly into the _¡Viva Baja!_ exhibit with all the neon tropical creatures there, and when Lance stopped to press his hand to the glass Keith passed him by into the next corridor without looking twice.

So Lance moved on too, out to the wide balcony that overlooked Monterey Bay, and when he looked down to the sea below he saw Keith sitting on the rocks sticking up from the sea a hundred feet out. Before he could call out to him, Keith slipped into the water.

A searing panic gripped him at Keith's disappearance.

_Wait._

_Wait, don’t go!_

He tried to lean over the railing to call Keith back, but unseen interlopers grabbed at his shirt, pulling him away from the edge. Sea mist flecked across his face, ice cold. He sucked in a sharp breath, succumbing to the panic, because Keith was leaving. He was leaving leaving leaving, Lance could feel it in his chest even though he couldn’t see him going, taking root, unwanted yet immutable. It was an inherent knowledge. Gasoline in his bones where there should've been marrow. The sea mist trickled down his cheek onto his neck, and—oh fuck, that _tickled_ —

Gasping in the darkness, Lance launched upright, and would have smacked his face right into Keith’s if Keith hadn’t put his hand on his chest and pushed him back down.

Disoriented, he swiped the water off his face and neck with the back of his hand, slowly realizing that Keith was here, and had been leaning over him to wake him up, and was dripping seawater on him. A bit of it had trickled into the corner of his lips and he licked it away. The taste of salt brought his dream slamming back into the forefront of his consciousness before he could lock it down. The shape of Keith was barely discernible in the darkness, but he was here. Who else would it have possibly been, anyway?

“Um,” Keith murmured, distress and guilt heavy in his voice. “Hey, Lance.”

Slightly more awake now, Lance gave Keith a quick once over as his eyes adjusted to the dark. No shark bites or missing fins. He was _fine_. Fury and hurt swiftly replaced Lance’s worry, and he shoved Keith off with both hands so he could sit up.

“I’m sorry,” Keith blurted. “Look, I know you’re probably mad—”

“Mad?” Lance hissed. “‘Mad’ does not even begin to describe how I’m feeling, you absolute asshole.”

“Let me explain,” Keith pleaded in earnest. “I really meant to go back to our beach that night. But I heard something weird out in the harbor and I had to check it out, and I… I found it.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

“It _was_ ,” Keith breathed. “Lance, I found _people_.”

Lance’s jaw dropped. “...You what?”

“Mer,” Keith explained, gesturing frantically. “Three of them! They’re like me! They were just swimming out there in the harbor, and I found them, and then I was stuck _._ I couldn’t go back to you because I was afraid they’d leave the area if I left them alone, and I couldn’t handle the thought of it. I haven’t seen a mer since my dad died, Lance, I just panicked. I didn’t know what to do. They wouldn’t come to the grotto at first because they were suspicious about it so I’ve just been following them around like a lost seal and—”

“Woah, hey,” Lance soothed, placing one hand on Keith’s shoulder as his breathing grew erratic. Had he even slept at all since Friday? Now that Lance looked, the skin under his eyes was much darker than usual, edging on a rich purple. “Hey, it’s okay.” He reached into the water and splashed some on Keith, and that seemed to help calm him down a little. “Look, I was really hurt, yeah, but I completely understand now that I know why you were gone. I get it now, okay? This is… wow. Where are they now?” Keith bit his lip, bouncing a little in place. His eyes flitted over to the water, and Lance followed his gaze. “Oh my god,” Lance whispered, “you brought them here?”

“Yeah, I was finally able to convince them to come and meet you. Is that okay?”

“What! Of course it’s okay! Holy— Hang on, I’m gonna turn on the lights.”

Lance scrambled to his feet and bustled around the black cave, flicking on the string lights and the lantern and lighting the jar candle on the table for good measure. He leaned out over the water, trying to see. It was still dark down there but he could make out three dark shapes now, and as he looked they began to move. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. This was real. This was happening.

Three heads surfaced.

There was one girl who looked about their age, with hair the color of starlight, and dark skin. The other two were even paler than Keith, one of them a bit younger, with long yellow Rapunzel hair and more rounded cheeks, and the other one a man who was old enough to be their dad, with fiery orange hair. The yellow-haired mermaid lifted something out of the water--an old rounded whiskey bottle, one of Keith’s favorite pieces of useless but pretty harbor trash. She upended it, pouring out the seawater inside with curiosity, clicking at him questioningly in that high-frequency mer language that Lance never heard Keith use anymore (except when he hurt himself on accident and fell to swearing in clicks). Keith responded in one sharp click, slipping off the ledge and back into the water as he did so. The girl immediately dropped her arm back into the water, sending ripples outward all around the three of them, splashing up their arms.

Unlike Keith, who wore nothing (except his satchel on occasion), they were all wearing some sort of woven colorful accessory—not clothing _,_ per se, but more like elaborate jewelry which cascaded down over their shoulders, tied up in intricate geometric shapes down their arms and cinched like bracelets at the wrist. Lance desperately wanted a closer look. Were these mer a family unit? Or were they just traveling together? Keith always said his dad was an outlier and that mer usually stuck together in groups, but neither of them had ever dreamed they'd just happen upon a group of mer like this, considering how long they’d gone without seeing any. Suddenly nervous and hyper-aware of his every movement, eager to make a lasting first impression, Lance sat down on the ledge and gave them all a tentative wave and a toothy grin.  

Eyeing him warily, the white-haired girl pushed her wet hair behind her shoulder and spoke—not in mer, but also not in English.

“Hvilket sprog taler du?” She blinked at him questioningly, and he felt like an idiot for not having the faintest idea what she'd said.

“Uhh..”

“Français, peut-être?” the blonde-haired mermaid cut in, dipping forward with a brilliant smile that made Lance blush. “Inuvialuktun?”

“Soy fluido en español, pero algo me dice que no hablas eso...” Lance joked. “But I also speak English?”

“He speaks English!” the oldest mer exclaimed, speaking it with a distinct British accent. “Wonderful! We know that one!” He did a quick roll in the water to come a few feet closer to the ledge, and to Lance. _Dark gray, spotted tail,_ Lance noted quickly, although he was trying not to gape. _No scales at all. Totally smooth. Woah…_ He’d been picturing other mer species wrong for years, apparently. Where was his imagination?!

“Where are you all from?” Lance wondered in awe. How far must these three have traveled to speak English with British accents, and to also know what sounded like Danish, French, and… and maybe even Inuit? And to have a tail like that, they must be from somewhere far colder than here.

At his words, the white-haired girl narrowed her eyes at him and then clicked at Keith.

“I told you,” Keith grumbled back (in English—thank you, Keith), “you don't need to worry about that. Lance is the most harmless human who's ever lived. He's only asking that on my behalf.”

“Well, you can call me Coran,” the older man grinned, opting to ignore the surge of tension in order to finish crossing the gap and enthusiastically shake one of Lance's hands with both of his. “Keith has already told us your name, of course. My overly suspicious niece here is Allura, and this here is our friend and traveling companion, Romelle.”

“It's very nice to meet you all,” Lance said, distracted. He was busy trying to document their every feature, figuring out how similar they were to Keith, and how different. Their earfins were much, much longer than Keith's, and they all had patches of scales on their necks around the gills, although they were different colors. Romelle's were silver-blue, while Allura's were as fluorescent white as her hair. Coran's were a dark lunar gray, matching patches of speckles on his shoulders where they peaked above the water, reminiscent of a leopard seal's.

“They're from up north,” Keith told Lance, drifting back toward the ledge and resting his temple on it. “ _Way_ up north. Think: glaciers.”

“Amazing,” Lance sighed. “That’s so far! Are you migrating? Or just traveling? Is it a yearly thing or—?”

“So many questions,” Allura hummed in amusement.

“He really likes the ocean,” Keith laughed softly, “and everything inside it. He kinda studies it.”

“I mean yeah,” Lance agreed, scarcely able to keep a tamper on just how thrilled he was. How was Keith so calm about this?! Okay well, maybe he’d had two whole days to come to terms with it while Lance had been given about two seconds. But still, this was a world-shattering development! “But it’s not just that. Oh man, I have so many questions for you guys I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t know if Keith’s told you this, but we’ve actually never met any other mer before. Like, _ever_.”

“Yes,” Coran said slowly, “Keith explained his situation.”

“We may have thought he was crazy at first, the way he pounced on us out of the blue,” Allura giggled, one hand over her mouth. “We didn’t expect to meet any mer in the area. Especially not a _loner_. Loners are incredibly rare since they usually end up as shifters. But once he explained...”

“I still can't believe it,” Romelle cooed, twisting closer to Keith and briefly revealing her tail to look more like a shimmering swordfish’s tail than Coran's leopard seal look. Badass. These three looked completely, utterly different from Keith in every way. It set Lance wondering just how many different races of mer there were out there in the ocean. “How lonely you must have been all these years.”

“I've done alright for myself,” Keith responded, rubbing his neck shyly before leaning his head on Lance’s knee.

“Don’t you get restless here?” Romelle wondered, eyeing the contents of their little grotto with equal parts interest and disdain.

“I mean, sometimes,” Keith admitted, snaking an arm around Lance’s leg underwater, almost like he had felt Lance tensing at Romelle’s implication, as innocent as it was. “But I—”

“You should join our pod! We’ll be in this lovely warm area for a while yet, but when we move on you’re welcome to join us.” Lance’s heart felt like a sinking stone, and he would have been panicking if not for Keith’s steady grip around his leg, the way he soothed his thumb over Lance’s ankle where he was bouncing it anxiously against the rock. Before Keith could answer, Allura did it for him.

“You haven’t thought your suggestion through, Romelle,” Allura scolded with a gentle practicality, “look at his fins.” The water rippled around her as she dipped under and resurfaced next to Keith, pulling the very tip of his tailfin out of the water with her, eyeing Romelle. “He’s not from the Arctic, he would freeze there even in the summer.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Romelle quipped back, splashing Allura with her own tail as Keith hastily pulled his away from Allura, shrinking farther into Lance’s leg as he did so. “Where are you from originally, Keith?”

It took him a few seconds to answer. “Well, I was born about five hundred miles south of here, off the coast of Baja California. My dad was from across the Pacific, but he didn’t have any family. He was a loner too. As for my mom… She left her family to come up north, which was where she and my dad met, the area where I was born. So her family—my family—is somewhere even farther south than that. I know that much, but.. the rest is lost.” Clearing his throat, he leaned into Lance’s offered hand at the back of his head. “And thanks for the offer, but I like it here, so I'll pass.”

“Ah,” Coran said. He shot Lance a wink, throwing his hands behind his head and beaming. “See, girls, you were worried about our new friend for nothing. He does have a pod after all.”

“Um, yeah,” Keith laughed, a little breathlessly and a lot self-consciously. “I guess I do.”

Lance ruffled his hair with a surge of overflowing affection. How distant his anger and hurt felt now. How could he have been so upset with Keith only a few short hours ago? It felt like a lifetime ago, because they were talking to three other real-life mer and Keith just called Lance his _pod_.

“Oh,” Romelle gasped, and it was clear she’d just put two and two together. “ _Oh_. You two are…” She pointed between them, halfway between embarrassed and enamored.

“Romelle,” Allura chided, pushing her hand back down into the water so that she wasn’t pointing at them anymore. “Don’t put them on the spot.”

“It’s cool. Yeah, we’re like, together,” Lance giggled, raising a peace sign and crossing his fingers to demonstrate. “In it for the long haul and all that jazz. It’s a bummer Keith can’t go with you,” he added a little sadly, “cause I’m sure he’d love the chance to travel with you, but—”

“Long haul,” Keith reiterated.

“Right,” Lance said, stupidly, his heart flipping over a little at hearing Keith repeat those words so certainly, especially in this context. Forgive him for being a teensy bit worried that Keith might up and decide he wanted to go with them. “So—”

“We understand,” Coran interrupted, holding one speckled hand up to cut Lance off before he fumbled his way through the rest of whatever he was gonna say. “No need to explain. It’s a totally normal thing, actually. Although I’m sure it’s somewhat novel to you since you’ve never met any others like us before, beyond Keith.”

“It’s… normal?” Lance wondered detachedly, something about Coran’s words not connecting. Keith’s thumb stilled on Lance’s ankle, furthering the sudden sense of off-ness that suddenly permeated the air.

“Of course,” Coran answered easily, not picking up on the true magnitude of Lance’s confusion. “We all have shifters in the family. Our pod used to be a lot bigger than this, you know. Romelle here joined us once her brother shifted. Decided on _dolphin_ of all the things, can you believe it?”

“He wanted me to go with him, but I wasn’t sold,” Romelle cut in, “I enjoy having hands too much!” She waved them above the water to illustrate her meaning, waggling them by her cheeks with a stifled giggle. “I’m glad he chose that though, since I still get to see him every time we migrate south. I mean, it could have been worse, right?” Here she glanced at Allura fleetingly before averting her eyes.

“What…” Lance whispered, eyes flicking to Allura. She didn’t appear to be confused by either Coran’s or Romelle’s words, and that sinking feeling from Hidden Beach slammed back into him full force, that howling gale at the back of his mind, that dragging sensation that told him he was missing something gravely important. Some life-altering puzzle piece dangling out of reach. The one Keith had refused to hand over.

“My parents decided on polar bears,” Allura said next, her voice heavy with emotion, as if this explained they way Romelle had looked at her as though walking on eggshells. “I was a little upset, obviously, since I never saw them as shifters, and even then, to choose a _land animal..._ But then again, the heart wants what it wants. I suppose you can sympathize with my struggle, Keith,” she added, compassion flashing through her eyes and softening her sad expression into something sympathetic. “What, with your mother’s choice.”

Lance looked down numbly at Keith, his brain a steady flatline that refused to soak up any of this conversation. He couldn’t see his face. Could only hear his strained voice when he spoke. “I— Yeah.”

“Enough sad reminiscing,” Coran announced with an abrupt change of pace, clapping his hands, spraying Romelle and Allura with water. “We’ve never met someone who chose _human_ before!” He beamed brightly at Keith, who still hadn’t moved an inch. They all looked so soft and warm in the wash of the string lights and lanterns, but Lance was cold, and numb. His legs had sat so long in the chilled water that he could scarcely feel them anymore, but he was too far down the rabbit hole to pull them out now. “It’s not unheard of,” Coran said, “but it is something of a delightful rarity. And now we can brag about meeting you to our friends up North—”

“What he _means to say,”_ Allura ground out, pushing Coran playfully out of the way, “is congratulations on your choice. I’m sure you’ll love being human.”

That was what finally did it.

Lance broke all at once, his voice cracking through the soft atmosphere. “What the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

Everyone froze.

Allura’s mouth fell open into a small, shocked ‘o’ and she looked to Keith, who still said nothing. “Keith?” Lance said. “You wanna clue me in here?” Keith said nothing and did nothing except pull away from Lance’s leg, keeping his face down and hidden by his hair so Lance couldn’t even try to pick up clues from his expression. _“Keith.”_

 _I’m sure you’ll love being human._ What in the hell was that possibly supposed to mean? Why would they say something like that? What were they talking about?! Polar bears and dolphins and birds— Maybe he was still asleep and none of this was even real. Honestly, his aquarium dream made a thousand percent more sense than this. He must have looked and sounded as distraught as he felt because Coran’s face began to fall as he drank in the strength of Lance’s confusion.

“Ah,” he said contritely. “It appears we have— How do you say it in English—?”

“Messed up,” Romelle whispered, sinking down and bringing the old whiskey bottle up to hide her face, and Keith hiked his shoulders up so far that they almost touched his earfins. “I don’t think Lance knew about shifters,” she whispered to Allura even quieter than before.

Keith sucked in a deep breath and put one hand over his face, whispering a string of unintelligible mer curses into his hand.

“No,” Lance answered saltily, in the glaring absence of any kind of response from Keith, “No, I don’t think he did.”

“Sorry Keith,” Romelle blubbed, her mouth half underwater as she sank lower and lower, moving behind Allura as she did so until she was barely peeking out from behind Allura’s shoulder.

Pity and guilt danced in Allura’s eyes as they flitted back and forth between Lance and Keith. “I think we have made some incorrect assumptions,” she said carefully, “and perhaps the three of us should take our leave before we make it worse.”

“Wait,” Lance blurted, because he was confused and kind of imploding, but not so much that he would let an opportunity like this slip out of Keith’s life. “Wait, you don’t have to go.”

“It’s alright,” Coran said. “We will not leave the area yet, not now that we’ve met a mer in need. That’s not how we do things. Anyway, we’re on a seasonal migration, and we can hunt just fine in this harbor for the foreseeable future. Keith,” he said, “sleep easy. We’ll still be here tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Keith mumbled, almost inaudibly. Coran gave Lance a jovial wave and then dove under, followed by a still-mortified Romelle, who couldn’t bring herself to wave, and lastly Allura, who dove up and over before disappearing below the surface, revealing her tail as something totally dissimilar from the others’; sleek and smooth, black and white, with a short dorsal fin on her lower back and two thick fins at the end of her powerful tail that slapped the water as she went down, sending a spray of water up in her wake so high that flecks of seawater landed in the outer cave entrance two dozen feet away. If Lance hadn’t seen her upper body first he would have sworn on his life that it was an orca whale.

And just like that the three mer were gone, and he and Keith were alone in the grotto.

There was a long, long silence. Yes, he was jumping to about a thousand different conclusions, each more surreal than the last. Lance’s mind was racing, but to be quite frank, he was confused, annoyed, elated, overwhelmed, _crazy_ fucking sleep-deprived, and the torrent of emotion was so contradictory that it was beginning to just cancel itself out. If you asked him he would have said he was feeling nothing.

“This is not how I wanted you to find out,” Keith finally said, turning his head in Lance’s direction for the first time since Lance had come to sit at the water’s edge, but only just far enough for the candle light to flicker on his chin and the edge of his cheek. His eyes were still hidden below his wet bangs.

“I don’t understand.” Lance’s fingers dug into the rock so he wouldn’t act on the impulse to push Keith’s bangs out of his eyes. “Or, I’m pretty sure I do actually, it’s just that it doesn’t make any sense. Because what it sounds like is that shifting species is just a _thing_ that mer can do and it’s as simple as cutting your hair.”

“It’s not—”

“Allura’s parents became polar bears, Romelle’s brother became a friggin’ dolphin—I thought they were insane for a hot second there, but then, your _mom._ ”

“I never kept that part a secret,” Keith mumbled.

“Yeah, but you knew I never took that seriously! I thought it was dad-speak for ‘she died!’ And you just let me think that! She _really, legitimately_ just turned into an actual bird? She just—she just decided she’d do it and then she sprouted wings and flew away?! I thought— Keith, I—” Lance trailed off, dragging one hand through his hair and back again. He willed his voice not to break. “You told me you _wanted_ to be human. Please. I’m just trying to understand why you kept this from me when it’s everything we ever fucking wanted.”

This idea, this fairytale answer to their would-be tragic love story, it was a foreign dream that Lance had never dared let himself think about for more than half a second before shoving it away with a half-hearted laugh. He hadn’t watched The Little Mermaid since he was eleven because it was too painful knowing something like that could never happen in real life. But now... It could. The more he thought about it, the more it actually made sense. Mer were a species caught between two polar opposites, land and sea. By all means, they shouldn’t exist. He’d often wondered why they existed here on this planet at all, what circumstances allowed for them to evolve, what branch they occupied on the evolutionary tree. If anything, this inherent ability to metamorphose based on the different demands of their natural environment made more sense to Lance than the fact that mer even existed in the first place. So it _could_ happen, and it _sounded_ like it was as simple as making a choice, and Keith had known this fact for his entire life. He’d known it for as long as they’d known each other. He'd known it for as long as they’d been in love. He’d known it when they’d laid in the Redwoods together and he’d first let it slip.

_I wish I was human._

If that was really true, then what on Earth was stopping him?

There were plenty of answers that came swimming to mind right away. If he was Keith, would _he_ give up everything he had just to be with someone like Lance? Lance was just a guy. An average looking, average talent, average life guy. And Keith was…

“Lance, I’ve tried, okay? I’ve tried.”

…What.

Lance lifted his eyes from the palm of his hand where he’d been resting his face.

“I’ve tried,” Keith repeated, “like, _thousands_ of times. I think there’s something wrong with me. I’m _broken_ , or… I don’t know. Or something. That’s why I didn’t tell you about it. I knew it’d just upset you if you knew it was possible but I still couldn’t do it.”

“You tried?”

“Yeah, at least once a day for the last... basically since the day I met you, I guess.”

Images flashed in Lance’s mind, memories in quick succession. All those times Lance walked in on Keith glaring at his tail in deep concentration, eyes glazed over. _Oh._

“Hey,” Lance hummed, his anger and confusion abruptly snuffed. This whole conversation was emotional whiplash to the nth degree, but there was nothing that calmed him down faster than the telltale hitch in Keith’s voice that meant he was trying not to cry. Reaching out over the water, he pushed Keith’s bangs out of his eyes, tucking them behind his earfin. “Hey, come’ere.”

Blinking slowly, Keith drifted over, taking a deep shuddering breath as he came, which was even less steady on the exhale. “When I’d ask why my mom left us, my dad always used to say, ‘Because, Keith, we are creatures of change, and it’s in our nature. Someday, you’ll understand.’ And I always told him I wouldn’t, but now I do. I really do.” He let his forehead come to rest on Lance’s knee. It was probably the saddest he’d ever allowed himself to openly feel in front of Lance, and Lance hated seeing him like this. Lifeless and dreary when he was usually teeming with energy and fire. It was so wrong. He wanted to fix it, but he didn’t know where to even begin. He still felt blindsided; was still desperately trying to fit this blinding puzzle piece into his memories, back through the days and months and years.

“So this is what you were freaking out about on Friday,” Lance muttered, more to himself than to Keith. Then, to make him laugh: “You were trying to Frog Prince yourself. And here I thought you were just high on sea-weed.”

“Oh my god,” Keith groaned, but even though Lance couldn’t see it, he could definitely hear the smile in his voice. Gotcha.

“Come up here, would you? I’m cold.”

“Lance..”

“Keith,” Lance mocked good-naturedly. “Come on.” He pushed his knees apart and patted one thigh, kicking Keith in the ribs for good measure.

“I told you, I’m too heavy.”

“You’re not,” Lance insisted. “Now come’ere. Please? I need to tell you something important.”

It was a sign of the true depth of Keith’s sadness that he didn’t put up a fight like he normally would, and just gave in instead, lifting himself out of the water by the hands and letting Lance pull him up into his lap the way he’d always wanted to, letting his tail flop sideways over his other leg and off the ledge, his lowest fins fanning out on the surface of the water. Lance was completely soaked within seconds, but it was okay, because despite the chill of the water that clung to his skin, Keith was warm. Once he’d settled he leaned in toward Lance, like he was expecting a kiss. But instead, Lance wrapped both his arms around Keith’s waist and buried his face in Keith’s neck, pulling him into a hug so tight that a puff of air was forced out of Keith’s lungs. It was a moment before Keith was able to gather his wits and hug him back.

“I’m gonna tell you something,” Lance said, “so just sit there and listen for a sec, okay, because I never want you to forget this. You and me...” he began, “we belong together.” He didn’t know what to even call it, this thing they had. It was so much bigger than just _dating_. So much deeper. Unnameable. Ineffable. “I wanna be with you in whatever way we can be, and if you becoming human is a serious possibility, then there’s nothing on this godforsaken Earth that’s gonna stop us from getting there. Don’t get me wrong,” he laughed, pulling his face out of Keith’s neck to rake his eyes lovingly down his tail, pulling playfully at one of the fins on his side. “I love this stupid tail of yours. I love everything about you, exactly the way you are, and if this ‘shifter’ thing never works then that’s that and I’ll still love you. But, now that I know, I’m gonna help you. I’m gonna help the _fuck_ out of you because we’re in this together whether you like it or not.”

Lights flickered along the edge of the fin Lance was holding, and Keith batted his hand away playfully.

“When I try to… to get the change going... I can feel it almost working,” he said. The words came out slow and deliberate, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he searched for them, like he’d never tried to put this into words before and he was having trouble finding the right ones. He brought his palm absentmindedly to his chest before continuing. “There’s this heat in my chest, like I’m trying to swallow fire or something. But then..” He trailed off and heaved a deep, affected breath. “I don’t know. It just never takes hold.”

“That’s someplace to start, though, right?” Lance said, excitement leaking into his voice like gasoline near an open flame. He was trying to keep a level head about this, but inwardly he was soaring. Keith sounded so sad, but he was basically describing _magic_. Lance couldn’t be sad about this. He couldn’t afford to. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”

Lance trailed his hand down Keith's hip, moved in to gently press their lips together.

“Okay,” Keith breathed out against his mouth. Just like that.

And as the thin sliver of sky and rocks visible through the grotto’s entrance slowly become visible in the light of morning, Lance kept on kissing him, long and slow and aching, attempting to show him without words just how desperate and raw and unquenchable his love was. And when he fell asleep later, sprawled out on the blankets by the water’s edge, if he had a strange waking dream that Keith was sleeping there next to him instead of at the bottom of the lake, washed in salt and stars with pale human legs tangled up in the blanket with his own—

—well, he wanted to believe that it meant something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact! the conversation w laura is based on the actual conversation i had w my own sister when she came out to me as bi and i was like WAIT HOLY SHIT ME TOO and we high-fived and vented about all the girls we've ever had crushes on lol
> 
> PLEASE NOTE - i know i've updated regularly every friday up until now and i still hope to do that but i have some personal shit going on so it's possible that might not happen as consistently. pls bear with me. love u!


	5. The Preserve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Monarch Butterfly Preserve at Natural Bridges](https://www.californiabeaches.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Monarch-Butterflies-Cedar-980x700.jpg)

When Lance woke up, it was all at once.

He sat up with a jolt, the memory of last night slamming into him at light speed, and he only had a split second to wonder if it’d all been some sort of crazy fever dream before something smacked him in the head. A slightly-squished energy bar fell off his shoulder into his lap, and he turned to see Keith sitting at the edge of the rocks, eyeing him. “You’ve missed your first two classes,” he said.

Looking down at his watch, he swore. Ahh whatever. He'd initially planned to ditch anyway, right? “It’s alright, we’ve gotta make a game plan, anyway,” he said.

Keith quirked an eyebrow. “Gameplan?”

“Yeah!” He ripped open the energy bar, spewing crumbs in his excitement to get started. (It wasn’t the best breakfast but they had like four million of them in the grotto and they never went bad, so.) “I have a lot of ideas on how to jumpstart this shifting thing.” Okay yeah whatever, so ‘magic kisses’ weren’t a real thing and that route was a giant no-go. That didn’t mean Lance had any shortage of ideas.

“Oh yeah? Like what.”

“Take you to do human stuff, teach you more human things, maybe introduce you to more humans, we can even get Pidge and Hunk to help too,” he rushed. “I bet they'd have some actual, like, sciencey ideas. I don't know.”

“Okay,” Keith laughed, eyeing the crumbs on Lance’s lap and rolling his eyes fondly. “When do we start?”

“Um.. actually,” he said, wilting as his brain caught up with his heart. “Not until your new friends leave, I guess,” Lance sighed, realizing belatedly that Keith was gonna have to devote his time to the three newcomers while they were here. “These three mer are only in the area for so long, and I feel like you should spend some time with them… right?”

Keith wilted a bit too, but he also looked relieved. “Yeah,” he said. “I just—” It was only then that Lance noticed Keith was wearing his old satchel already; so he'd already been waiting to leave when Lance awoke. Ah. “Yeah. You're right. I can't exactly pass this up.”

“Hey, what do you think of them?” Lance asked, trying to read the warring emotions in Keith's shuttered eyes, his squared shoulders. They hadn't had time to talk about them, yet, and Keith making friends was a big deal enough on its own even aside from the fact that they were mer. He had to be feeling weird right now.

“I don't know,” Keith said. “I mean, they're not exactly…” He stopped and shook his head, hiking his satchel's strap farther onto his shoulder and amending his words to: “I guess I always thought I'd have to go out looking to ever find any other mer. Seems kinda fateful that some of them came and found me first, doesn't it?”

“Sap,” Lance accused, his lip curving up into a smirk.

“Jerk.” But he was smirking too.

“So are you going to meet them now?”

“Yeah, they’re waiting for me outside.”

“Okay. Just... make sure to ask them lots of questions, okay? Don’t do your whole ‘silent and broody’ thing.”

In response, Keith glared at him silently and broodily and slipped off into the water.

But he resurfaced before actually leaving to give him a parting, salty-wet goodbye kiss, and that was enough to make up for the ungodly amount of sass in Lance’s opinion. Lance watched him go with an odd, airy feeling in his chest, and sat back to finish his breakfast bar, thinking through the game plan by himself, committing to memory the scene he'd dreamt of Keith's legs tangled with his on the blanket.

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

The three mer stayed in Santa Cruz for almost a whole month. (Well, you know. Off-shore of Santa Cruz.) They were on their way back north after migrating south from the Arctic circle for the winter, but they were so taken with Lance and Keith that they decided to hang around as long as they could, teaching Keith various things about mer culture. Or, about their mer culture at least. There was no getting around the fact that these three mer were very obviously a different race than Keith, and had never come into contact with Keith's mom's family before. Regardless of their origin, meeting them was a game-changer. Lance loved to watch them interact, and listen to them speak in mer when they got too into the subject matter and inevitably forgot Lance was there, slipping easily out of their accented English into those high pitched clicks. It was very wholesome and cute.

But that was rare.

Mostly, the four of them just weren't around. Allura, Coran, and Romelle were understandably wary of the shoreline, and they would only come to the grotto at night, which meant Lance hardly saw them, and that Keith was also scarce. Because of this they had to put a pin in that whole shifting thing. Keith was reluctant to wait, now that Lance knew about it, but Lance actively encouraged him to spend as much time with the other mer as he could before they left, and not to worry about Lance. There would be time. That was the one thing they were in no real shortage of.

In the meantime, Lance did a little more of his homework than he usually did and picked up extra shifts on the Wharf to fill the hours of the day. He friggin’ hated his stupid job, but at least he got the closest ocean view in all of Santa Cruz from the front window of the gift shop, and it was only a little marred by the fact that he had to look at it between tacky, mass-produced snow globes filled with their own miniature oceans.

Anything for a buck, right?

He'd been saving up his paychecks for a while now to buy a kayak, so he could paddle around offshore and Keith could splash around him without fear of being seen by onlookers. He’d prefer to take the family boat out, of course, but he didn’t have his certification yet (cue SpongeBob joke—seriously, he could  not so much as even mention this around Hunk or Pidge without a 'boating license' joke) and his parents would skin him alive if they caught him sneaking it out. But, a kayak was the next step up from hanging onto Keith’s shoulders and treading water, so it was worth the money, and all these extra shifts at the gift shop meant he was finally able to afford it. However, the existence of Keith’s new friends meant he was so busy that he ended up not being able to go the first few times Lance took it out to sea.

But it was okay. He took Beni and Gabi and they had a blast, except for the part where Lance pretended they were being swept out to sea to scare them, like Marco had done to him and Laura when they were Beni and Gabi's ages, and then they tried to team up to push Lance overboard in retaliation. That part was more like a Lacoste-McClain tradition.

Over the course of this month he ended up spending a lot of time alone out in the kayak, in the gentle silence of the sea. It was strange how as he grew older, so too the ocean seemed to grow in juxtaposition with his harbor, with his patch of Earth, with his body, instead of shrinking like he once thought it might. The older he got, the smaller he felt. He could paddle for hours and get almost nowhere in the grand scheme of things, somehow still able to see the tip of his neighborhood no matter how far it felt like he’d gone. As he drifted through the surface kelp, listening to music and podcasts and daydreaming about someday having Keith inside this boat with him, he would inevitably end up wondering where the four mer were at in the harbor, what they were doing, whether they were having fun, whether Keith was learning something new about the sea beyond the coast of California. When he did see Keith alone, however briefly, he generally tried to suggest that he show the other mer his mom's dagger, to see if they might know anything culturally significant about the mer who made it. But for some reason Keith was reluctant. He much preferred to let the other mer talk, and didn't ask questions. Lance didn’t really understand why, but then, there were a lot of mysteries about Keith's motivations that escaped him. In the end it was Keith’s choice, he supposed. But still… he couldn’t help thinking about that knife every time he saw those mer, and it was tough to keep from just asking them himself. Maybe if he just, like.. mentioned it offhand sometime…

“Hello!”

Lance screeched loudly as his right earbud was pulled from his ear by a wet hand, too startled to realize it was Allura who had spoken until after he’d already embarrassed himself half to death. Giggling contritely, she slipped back into the water, grabbing his dropped oar and placing it back in his hand.

Still wheezing, Lance just let it go again (there was a failsafe to keep them from slipping off the side of the boat) and placed his hand on his heart. “Oh my god, you scared the bejeezus out of me.”

“What are you listening to?” she wondered, pulling herself up onto the lip of the boat to look at his phone in its protective sleeve.

“Just some music, and a podcast.”

“Pod… cast?”

Lance giggled, pulling his left earbud out too (which was connected to his iPod, letting him listen to music and learn at the same time because he was brilliant). “It’s not that kind of pod,” he explained, then turned up his phone volume and offered the phone/podcast earbud out to her. She leaned in, not close enough to get it wet but close enough to hear the voices chattering from inside it.

“Strange,” she whispered reverently, as though a boring TED Talk played slightly louder over a Spotify video game music playlist was the most wonderful thing ever, as though _Lance_ were the fairytale creature wielding magic instead of her. Seriously.. Didn’t she realize? Didn’t she understand that she had changed everything by coming here? She’d given Lance hope for a future with Keith, and that was the most magical thing in existence as far as he was concerned.

“So what’s up?” he asked, releasing the other oar too and settling back in his seat. The steady roll of the sea bobbed Allura toward and away from him steadily. “Are the others with you?”

“No, they went down to Monterey,” she said, “Keith wanted to show them something.”

“Oh,” Lance said, surprise kicking up in his gut and immediately settling into disappointment. “That’s… oh. Keith usually tells me when he’s going that far.”

“I’m sure he simply forgot,” Allura said after a moment of awkward silence. “He was rather excited to show us what he called ‘the coolest shipwreck ever.’"

“So why’d you stay behind?”

Lance blinked at her as she dipped down and then came back to the surface again even closer, laying out flat beside the kayak, her head near Lance’s knees and her white hair billowing out around her. Her black and white tail was so powerful as it moved to keep her in place that it ended up pushing Lance’s kayak away by minuscule degrees every time she moved it. “I thought we could hang out,” she grinned, her teeth like perfect pearls. The individual colored pieces that were woven together into that shawl-like accessory she wore glinted sharply in the sunlight as she moved in the water. He'd often wondered what it was made of. If he didn't know better he would've guessed it was plastic. “Keith said you were planning on taking your little dinghy out today,” she explained. It took him a second to remember that dinghy meant ‘boat.’ Ah, British slang. “Do you mind if I crash your solitude?”

“Not at all.”

“Wonderful. Carry on, then.”

Chuckling to himself at the sheer surrealness that his life had become entrenched in, Lance shrugged, picked his oars back up again, and resumed rowing.

They existed in amicable silence for a while, Allura popping in and out of the waves to grin at him, sometimes pushing kelp out of the way for the kayak to move through unhindered, sometimes grumbling as the kelp wound its way into her long, silken hair. It was strange how someone so intimidating could also be so adorable and harmless—kinda like Keith, he supposed. She was pretty much everything Lance had imagined mermaids to be before he met Keith, back when he was young and starry-eyed with a heart full of sparkling love stories.

Allura soon grew weary of simply following him and began to play around. He couldn’t tell if she was showing off or merely bored, or if maybe she just didn’t know how to talk to humans very well, or any combination thereof. But it was endearing. She kept catching fish and showing him and then releasing them unharmed, and before long she had begun to breach around him like a over-excited dolphin, laughing openly every time she splashed him, even going so far as to leap in a clean arc over his kayak, leaving him to watch her in shock as she cleared it easily and rocked his boat when she landed back in the water.

“Watch this,” she said the next time she surfaced, and before Lance had any time to protest, she had disappeared underwater again. There was a moment of waiting, and then—

“HA!” she yelled out as she breached the water full speed, except this time she didn’t clear the kayak, she landed square on the second seat, sending the whole thing teetering so dangerously far to the right that Lance nearly fell out. He flailed his arms, yelling all the while, and Allura just laughed as though it was the funniest thing. After a long moment and a great deal of water splashing into the kayak, they stabilized again, and Lance glared at Allura in fond exasperation where she was now inside his kayak, her elbows leaning on the edge and her tail flopping over the other side into the water.

“You almost capsized me,” he pointed out.

“Ah, but I didn’t,” she said back, squeegeeing her hair into the bottom of his kayak as if it wasn't already full of way too much water. “Oh dear,” she said, finally noticing the six-inch deep puddle at the bottom of the boat. “I’ll help get that out…”

Lance rolled his eyes goodnaturedly, picking up the oars again. “It’s fine. You can pay me back by getting Keith to come do this with us next weekend. I’ve been trying to show him this kayak for weeks.”

“Actually,” Allura said, “we’ll be going north again in just a few days, the three of us. We can’t wait much longer.” Lance slowed in his rowing as she draped herself over the side of the boat, trailing her hand in the surface of the water. “The waters are beginning to grow warmer and we must be north for the summer, while the ice is melted.”

“Makes sense,” Lance said. And though he wasn’t excited at the prospect of their new friends leaving town, he was selfishly excited to have Keith all to himself again. “You’ll come back next year though, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m kinda hoping Keith will be human by then,” Lance grinned, “if I have it my way. But we’ll still meet you down in the grotto no matter what.”

Allura kept her eyes on the water, watching the slow trail of foam left in the wake of her dipped fingers, eyes half-lidded. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Yeah? Okay. I’m listening.”

Still, it was a long minute before Allura spoke again, and Lance began to feel a growing suspense.

“There was this boy,” she said at long last. “A human boy. The one who taught us English.”

Registering her serious tone, Lance slowed to a stop again, letting the tips of the oars come to rest on his sunbaked knees, waiting for Allura to continue. Eventually, after a few moments of opening and closing her mouth again without saying anything, she did.

“We were in love, and he wanted me to shift,” she said, simply. “I thought I wanted it as well, but… in the end, I never did.”

“Uh-huh…”

“The thing about shifters,” she intoned, leaning in, “is that as complex as it sounds, once the desire is there and true, the shift itself is simple. It simply unfolds for you. It’s actually quite beautiful,” she noted. “So if someone were to try—say, if a girl were to try and shift for the sake of a love affair when she did not truly wish to shift—then it could not happen. The mer must want it wholly and without reserve. You either are a shifter, or you aren’t. It’s that simple.”

Lance was gripping the oars now so hard that his knuckles were turning white, but he didn’t think he could stop. He did not like where she was going with this. However, before he could find words to retaliate with, she continued.

“Or at least, it’s usually that simple,” she went on, her voice much softer. “You know,” she hummed, her mind far away as she switched gears faster than Lance could follow, “we didn’t used to migrate this far south.” There was a heaviness weighing down in her musical voice that wasn’t usually there. “The seas are changing, and the northern ice is changing too, faster than we were prepared to handle it. We have some human friends in Canada. They explained, somewhat, although I’ll admit I don’t fully understand—”

“Global warming,” Lance supplied, his voice carefully empty of emotion. He stared numbly down at his phone where it was balanced on his lap, where the words ‘ _TED TALK - Gavin Schmidt - The Emergent Patterns of Climate Change’_ still sat open on Spotify, paused at the halfway mark and partially obscured by the reflection of the sun. “You’re talking about global warming.”

“Yes,” Allura agreed brightly, “that is what they called it!” Her voice mellowed out again as she carried on with her story, though. “It has affected our pods greatly over the last few decades, and even more so, it has affected the various species we share the water with. My parents… they are…” she hummed to herself, toying with her hair. “How do I put it in human terms. They are a king and queen, of sorts, up north.”

“No,” Lance squeaked, totally blindsided by this info. “You’re—? Allura, you’re a _princess?!_ ”

_Oh my god, I’m literally talking to real-life Ariel, what the hell. What in the hell._

“I suppose,” she giggled, unaffected and undeterred by Lance’s shock. “So, being the rulers, they feel a sort of responsibility, not only for our people but for the ocean we live in, and the animals that make it their home and rely on it to survive.”

Ah… Okay. Lance was beginning to see where this was going.

“The polar bear population has been steadily going down,” she said, “and even though we are natural enemies of sorts since we hunt for the same food…” Here her voice broke momentarily, her eyes growing glassy. “I did not understand their decision,” she finally decided on. “It felt like such a small and insignificant way to help, and the fact that it would be permanent broke my heart, and therefore it took me many, many tides to come to terms with it.” Wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, she sat up, turning to Lance fully and hitting him with a very serious look. The sky was a blinding blue behind her pure white hair, her eyes the exact same sapphire shade, and he couldn’t help but think that anything she said was to be believed beyond a shadow of a doubt.  “Despite my misgivings, my parents tried to go forward with the shift. But.. it did not take.”

“Because there was something stopping them,” Lance realized with a jolt, remembering Keith's words, how he had used similar phrasing. “Something in the way.”

“Yes,” she said. “The thing that stopped me becoming human was the fact that I was doing it for a love affair and not for myself. But for my parents, it was my refusal to accept their choice. My parents could not live with the decision if they knew I would be unhappy, and that _feeling_ is what blocked the process. So once I did, at last, accept it... It happened all at once. Flash,” she giggled, mimicking fireworks with her hands and flicking stray flecks of water at Lance inadvertently, “sparkles, lights, the whole—what is it humans say? The whole _shebang_.”

“Wow,” Lance said, lost for words as he attempted to imagine such a thing happening to Keith, seeing his body come over with a white light, his tail silhouetted in stark relief, shifting into something solid and tangible and real that could carry his weight without any water at all, and came up short. “That’s—”

“It was magical,” she said reverently.

Sighing deeply, Lance pulled his oars in all the way and rested them across his lap; he couldn’t go anywhere while he was digesting this information. “What are you trying to tell me, Allura?”

“I think you know,” she said. “There is _something_ stopping Keith from changing—something deep in his heart—and you must find out what it is.”

Right.

Option A, or option B.

It was a long moment of sloshing, watery silence before Lance spoke again, eyes on the distant horizon, wishing Keith would just come home from Monterey already. “So if his problem is more like your parents’ problem,” (because he couldn’t handle considering option A), “if we can figure out what’s in Keith’s way, do you really think he…?”

Allura splashed him then, and when he looked over she winked, her eyes sparkling with unmasked hope. “It happens all the time.”

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

 

When the three mer departed to continue their migration north, they left Keith and Lance with parting gifts.

“We each spared a few of our own seascales to make them,” Romelle told Lance brightly as he turned the gift she'd handed him over in his hands. It was a bracelet, a thin and lightweight chain crafted with the same small, flat, plasticky scales that made up the intricate hanging jewelry the mer wore, clearly synthetic but whose composition remained mysterious. Each scale was a different color, meaning the whole thing was essentially a rainbow. Lance was into that.

It also meant that he and Keith had _two_ matching accessories now.

“Mine's gayer than yours,” Lance teased later that night once the mer had gone and they were alone in the grotto for the first time in weeks, holding his wrist up to Keith's and showing off that his was a full rainbow of color while Keith's was more of a sunset spectrum, and Keith was so ruffled over it that in the end they switched bracelets. “Joke’s on you,” Lance teased the second they’d switched, “I actually wanted this one all along. Ha! No take-backs.”

Keith just smirked at him. “Uh-huh. As if I didn’t know that. Do you have any idea how obvious you are?”

Lance’s stomach flipped over, hard. Dammit. Double dammit. Despite all the time that had passed since their first kiss, Keith was _still_ able to give him butterflies. How did that even work? What was his secret?! At this rate Lance was still gonna be blushing at Keith’s smoking hot smirk when they were seventy-five and Keith had lost all his teeth. In lieu of having a witty comeback, Lance cleared his throat and changed the subject, because a smug and flirty Keith was a dangerous Keith and they had Stuff To Do today so he couldn’t allow himself to be wooed right now.

“ANYWAY,” said loudly, because Lance was nothing if not smooth, “it’s time to get down to business.”

“To defeat the H—?”

“NO,” Lance giggled, leaning away from Keith as he leaned teasingly into Lance’s space, “stop distracting me, you demon! I’ve been waiting for weeks to get you alone. It’s game time, dude.”

“Alright, alright,” Keith said eagerly, his tail splashing in earnest on the top of the lake, disrupting the entire surface. “So, please tell me you have some ideas. Allura and them have given me pretty much nothing to work with. It’s so frustrating! I kept asking and asking but all Coran wanted to talk about was inane shit like how to properly fillet a cod and how to outsmart a leopard seal and the trade embargo between the Arctic mer and the Atlantic mer.”

“That’s actually kinda cool, if you ask me,” Lance grumbled. This was the first _he_ was hearing of mer politics.

“Sure, but it’s not… It’s got nothing to do with me,” Keith said in a huff. “I’m not an Arctic or an Atlantic mer. It’s cool to meet them and everything, it’s just.. Is it harsh to say I don’t care?” he laughed.

“A little.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I get it,” Lance said, nudging him with his shoulder. “I do. They’re cool and all, and it’s neat to learn about the lives of other mer, but it’s not _your_ trade embargo.”

“Right. Anyway... They never gave me any more info on shifting than what we’ve already talked about. I tried to ask but they just kept saying it’s different for everyone and there’s not much they could help me with. But…” he slowed, picking at a fin. “Allura did mention something.”

“Yeah, she told me the story too,” he said, and then when Keith quirked an eyebrow in surprise, “earlier this week when you guys went down to Monterey. And I think maybe I have a theory now, based around what she told me.”

That perked Keith right up. Lance had been sitting on this for days, and he was bursting at the seams to tell Keith about it. Unable to sit still with this much energy coursing through him like so many cups of coffee, making him all jittery, he got to his feet, leaving Keith sitting at the ledge. “Okay so, what I got from Allura was that basically, in essence, you have got _something_ up here blocking your biz.” He poked Keith’s forehead and was rewarded with Keith slapping his hand away.

“Thanks, genius.”

“You’re welcome,” Lance answered, choosing to ignore the sarcasm. “All we gotta do is unblock you. Laxatives-style.”

“Literally don’t ever say any of those words to me ever again,” Keith deadpanned.

“How would _you_ say it, then, since you’re such a wordsmith all of a sudden?”

“I would say… hm.”

He trailed off unwillingly and grew annoyed at not being able to think of anything better right away.

“Laxatives it is,” Lance said, and Keith immediately flicked his entire tail out of the water, sending a spray of water six feet high Lance’s direction. He screeched and dodged and then kicked Keith into the water in retaliation. But he was already laughing by the time Keith resurfaced, and Keith was too, and Lance felt himself actually, truly breathing again for the first time in weeks. He’d really missed this. Just hanging out. “Anyway,” he giggled, dancing backwards out of the warpath as Keith geared up like he might splash again, “my plan involves testing out some ways to unblock your chi or whatever—”

“Avatar style!” Keith exploded, lunging at the ledge in one smooth motion, sending a small wave of water washing up and over. “That’s better. We’re going with that.”

“Okay,” Lance giggled. “Fine, Avatar style.” He was digging through the baskets that lined the bottom shelf of their makeshift bookcase on the western end of the grotto. He shoved aside the old map that had been in here since they were ten, ever since the first week when Lance had brought it to show Keith where Shiro had gone.  Underneath it was a stack of notebooks, and Lance had to flip all the way through two before finding one with some empty pages. “So I was thinking, you should make a list of all the human things you’ve ever wanted to do so we can try them!”

Keith looked up at him with a dubious expression as Lance sauntered back over. “How’s that gonna help?”

“Well… I mean… Right now it’s all hypothetical to you, right? You don’t have a lot of actual experience in the human world beyond the shoreline, and me, and those few times we’ve gone to the Redwoods at night. So I was thinking, maybe you’re just uncertain, because you’ve lived in the sea all your life and you don’t know for sure what it’s gonna be like once you give it up.”

Keith hummed. “I dunno. I feel pretty certain about it.”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

Keith pressed his lips into a thin line.

“Right,” Lance laughed. “You don’t know. So let’s give this a shot, yeah?”

A rustling sound outside the outer entrance to the grotto caught both their attention, and as they looked over, Pidge slid down into the entrance on her ass like a five year old. “What is UP, boys and mers?!”

“Someone’s hyper,” Lance mumbled to Keith, fighting a grin as Pidge barrel-rolled out of the way on her side to let Hunk down, who was climbing in backwards like an actual adult.

“Don’t mind Pidge,” Hunk said, “she’s high on adrenaline.”

“We stole from a hospital!” Pidge shrieked in delight.

“Um,” Keith said.

“You _what?_ ”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Hunk said, and Lance noticed for the first time that he was lugging a backpack with him; it rattled as he walked. “But we did do that though. That _is_ a thing that we did today.”

“I thought you guys were here to help us with shifting,” Lance laughed, eyeing Hunk and Pidge as they started digging through the backpack, hooking up things to battery packs, untangling wires and straps. “Uh….”

“We are, we are. We’re just doing it our way.”

“It’s time for science!” Pidge hollered, and promptly began dragging Keith out of the water.

“Pidge, inside voice,” Hunk chastised, and pushed her aside to help Keith out himself, who was visibly amused by Pidge’s completely unhelpful attempt.

“What is all this stuff?” Keith watched with interest as Hunk and Pidge continued pulling various equipment out of the bag, working with the kind of hivemind efficiency that only two evil geniuses that had known each since they were six could possibly have.

“We're just gonna run some tests,” Hunk said. “Don't mind us.”

“Yeah, don't mind them,” Lance agreed, then grabbed Keith's hand and placed the pencil in it, flopping the open notebook he'd found next to him on the rocky ground. “Write down your bucket list! We're gonna spend the summer doing every last thing on it, okay? Just you wait, this is _totally_ gonna work.”

“Uh-huh,” Keith hummed, clearly just humoring Lance, but he picked up the notebook nonetheless and began to write while Hunk and Pidge bustled around him, getting up into his space to hook their stolen goods up to him while he tried to write, thoroughly mussing up his handwriting in the process. As soon as Keith realized Lance was trying to see what he was writing he lifted an arm to shove him away in embarrassment, only to realize his movement was now restricted by tangled wires.

“What the hell even are these things,” Keith mused, effectively distracted, dropping the pencil onto his lap for a second to tug at one of the sticky diodes that Hunk had been sticking to his skin in various places along his spine, chest, and the base of his neck near the head.

“Uh-uh,” Hunk scolded, slapping Keith's wrist. “Don’t touch!”

Keith grumbled, but acquiesced.

As soon as Hunk had turned away again Lance leaned in to poke at one himself. “I stole these from the hospital my mom works at,” Pidge whispered from behind Keith, although the echoey nature of the grotto meant that everyone heard her loud and clear, even over the sound of ripping velcro as she reattached a blood pressure cuff to Keith’s arm, having not gotten it on tight enough the first time around.

“We’re returning them when we’re done!” Hunk insisted.

“We’re not,” Pidge stated, plain and simple. “It's for a good cause, and stealing this stuff without getting caught was hard enough. I feel like trying to put it back is just testing fate.”

“Yeah, I think we’re already testing fate enough as it is,” Keith joked, pointedly wiggling the wires.

Hunk barked a laugh. “HA! Oh my god. Okay, okay! I'm all set. Pidge?”

Pidge nodded and they both sat back on their heels, eyeing Keith, who had reabsorbed himself into writing his bucket list. Curiosity got the better of Lance as Keith wrote, and so Lance glanced down again, trying to see the list. But he couldn't see the notebook from here, and that was when Keith noticed he was being watched by all three of his friends.

The pencil stopped scratching. “...What?”

“Do the thing now, Keith,” Hunk nudged. “Whatever it is that you do. We're just gonna document what’s happening in your body while you do whatever it is that you’re doing, okay? No pressure.”

“O-oh.” His eyes flitted to Lance briefly, then back down to the paper, then out over the lake. “Okay, yeah. No pressure,” he hummed to himself, and his eyelids fluttered shut.

As Lance had now witnessed a multitude of times without ever realizing what he was actually seeing, and three times since learning about shifters (one of which Hunk and Pidge were present for), Keith stilled and went silent. Concentrating. He was eerily still when he did this, more still than Lance had ever seen him before. Unable to help himself, Lance leaned in, searching for some sort of sign on his face that it was working.

“Crazy,” Hunk whispered, and Lance’s eyes snapped to him. He was hunched over the handheld device, his eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Pidge added, “his blood pressure is spiking hard, something is definitely happening.”

Despite himself, despite having already witnessed this fail many, many times (even if he didn’t realize what he happening most of those times), Lance felt his hopes escalating. Could this be it? Maybe this time? Keith’s eyes squeezed shut, his fists clenching tighter and tighter, and Lance couldn’t have breathed if he tried. Something was happening, right? He could see it on Keith’s face. He couldn’t possibly describe it but something changed between one moment and the next, and the hairs on Lance’s arm nearest to Keith began to stand on end. Whether it was in response to the charged atmosphere or a real electrical current was anyone’s guess. _This time for sure,_ Lance thought helplessly. Keith’s eyebrow was starting to twitch now, along with his earfins and—

“No, it’s evening out,” Pidge said, and Keith let out a pent up breath in one big gust of pure frustration.

“It’s pointless!” he exploded. “I’ve been at this _every day for years—_ ”

“No, it’s not pointless,” Hunk disagreed. “Now we have data to work with!” He and Pidge high-fived, the smacking sound comically loud in the silent grotto, and then pulled a notepad out of the backpack to start writing notes about what just went down.

Keith looked to Lance in exasperation. “Are they always like this when they’re doing science..?”

“Yes,” Lance said, “unfortunately.”

“Dude, I know you're frustrated,” Hunk continued, “but this is good. We have physical proof that something really is happening, and now that we can monitor your progress in a quantifiable way—”

“Rather than just like, looking at you and listening to you describe it with the same three adjectives over and over,” Pidge teased, pushing up her glasses in a pointedly unaffected way as Keith flipped her off.

“—now that we can put numbers to this, we'll at least know if you're getting closer or farther from succeeding,” Hunk finished, and stole the notebook from Pidge to write down some notes of his own.

Lance also leaned over, and smacked the notebook down onto the ground, earning a reproached look from Hunk and drawing the attention of all three of his friends. “Look guys, I’ll go along with your relentless need to put numbers to a problem, and I _do_ hope that it will help somehow, but now we've tried Keith's way,” (relentless repetition), “we've tried your way,” (this dumb sciencey crap), “but mark my words, _my_ way is gonna be the winner.”

“And what is your way, again?” Pidge asked.

A devious grin crept over Lance. “I’m glad you asked. Babe?”

“Don’t call me babe,” Keith grumbled, still miffed over yet another failure, but nonetheless he placed his own notebook into Lance’s waiting hand.

“Behold Keith’s bucket list,” Lance announced, displaying the messy list up under his chin and plastering on his most award-winning smile.

All he got was a constipated grimace from Keith, a blank look from Pidge, and a borderline concerned look from Hunk. “Um,” Hunk said, “buddy, you must not have looked at this list yet.”

Glancing between their three polarized expressions, Lance’s hand dropped. “Why, what’s wrong with it?” He knew he hadn’t given Keith a ton of time to write so it probably wasn’t finished yet, but that didn’t really warrant these reactions. Confused, he turned the notebook around so he could see it, and— ah.

 

_ to do list _

_\- walk_  
_\- walk a lot_  
_\- climb some mountains_  
_\- something illegal_  
_- ~~own a~~    ~~befriend a~~   dog_  
_\- coffee at the luna cafe_  
_\- find Shiro_  
_- fly_

 

“Keith, you adorable dumbass,” Lance laughed.

Keith’s earfins shot back like a ruffled cat. “You only gave me like one minute to think! This is the kind of stuff I’ve always wanted want to do, it’s not my fault.”

“Okay well, as fun as this list looks, we absolutely can’t do any of these things.” Lance passed back the notebook, ignoring Pidge’s snickers and Hunk’s unaltered look of concern, and the way he mouthed _‘something illegal?’_ to himself. “Can you try again with some things that are actually within the realm of possibility?”

They all leaned over Keith’s hunched shoulders as he snatched the notebook back and the sound of pencil scratch on paper filled the grotto once more, and as he wrote, Lance felt his smile returning full force.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah. These we can do.”

“This is perfect,” Pidge whispered reverently, and everyone looked at her; it was uncharacteristic for her to speak with such reverence of anything apart from the cold and unshakeable laws of mathematics.

“Why?” Hunk prompted. And there was the kicker:

“Duh,” she pointed, “there’s _eight things_. That’s one for every week of the summer, baby!”

 

 

**. . .**

 

 

      _- eat french fries (FRESH! NOT COLD!)_

 

“This is so stupid,” Pidge laughed, peeking under the blanket where Keith was hidden with a borderline ridiculous amount of blasé conspicuousness in the backseat, curled over on his side. “I can’t believe you wasted a bucket list item on this.”

Keith lifted the blanket more to retort back, “You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d only ever eaten room temperature, twenty-minute old fries.”

 _“Shhh, shut up,”_ Lance hissed at them as the drive-thru worker opened the window again. Lance plastered on his _‘nothing’s amiss here sir’_ grin he used on his parents when he and his siblings were up to mischief, and reached across the void to accept the humble offering of one crinkly paper bag filled with ten (yes, ten) large orders of McDonald’s french fries. “Thank you,” Lance made sure to say as he passed the bag over his shoulder to the back seat, and the freckly kid in the window gaped as the bag disappeared under the blanket.

Later that night, they tested Keith’s ‘shifting vitals’ again as he made another attempt, and Keith was hard-pressed to keep a straight face through the whole thing.

“Dude, you knew full well that this wasn’t gonna do anything,” Lance accused, throwing a leftover french fry at him. They still had so goddamn many french fries, he was gonna be finding them under the seats in his car for years. “You just wanted french fries!”

“Maybe so,” Keith said, and ate the fry.

“AH!” Pidge pointed, slapping Lance’s arm repeatedly, “Lance, Keith used a meme!”

 

 

_\- go to the redwoods during the daytime_

 

“This one is a real bucket list item,” Keith assured Lance when he pointed out how much more risky and difficult this one was going to be than going through a drive-thru and trying not to laugh. “I’ve only ever seen the Redwoods at night. Please?”

It was impossible to say no to him when he pressed his earfins back like that.

So they took him to the lookout spot again, but this time they went during the day, and they ended up meandering almost a full mile away from their parked car into the wild woods, paths be damned. Pidge kept a close eye on the compass (although Lance was pretty sure Keith wanted them to get lost, he would love that), and Hunk and Lance took turns carrying Keith, stopping whenever his eyes fell on a forest wonder that he was unfamiliar with. They played with banana slugs, they walked through spider webs, they poked at fluorescent orange mushrooms, they ducked under half-fallen trees, and climbed across chasms using the half-decayed corpses of old Redwoods as their bridges. At some point they began to hear running water, so they pressed on until they found the creek.

Of course, the discovery of the creek meant they had no excuse to leave that spot for the rest of the long summer day.

It _also_ meant they had a great excuse to come back once a week for the rest of the summer.

 

 

  _\- tire swing_

 

“Stop twisting! Oh my god— Keith!! I’m gonna fall, _stop it,_ AHAHA!”

“Fuck, _stop— You guys, stop, I’m gonna pee my pants—”_

_“No, I’m never getting out of this thing again, you can’t make me—”_

“Lance, get down, you’re tangling his fins with the rope!”

“No no no, Lance is vital to my balance, Hunk! Don’t— _fuck_ —”

The second Hunk pulled Lance off with one arm around the waist, Keith went flinging off in the other direction, crashing into Pidge. Lance flailed as his legs sought some sort of solid surface, and before he knew it, all four of them were lying in heaps on the saw chips that lined the ground of the playset at the park. Since Lance and Hunk were groaning and Pidge was cackling and clutching her stomach and visibly working not to pee her pants, Keith spoke up first.

“So, do you think all four of us could fit on it?”

 

 

      _-  go 100 miles an hour_

 

“We’re gonna get pulled over! Lance, this is seriously nuts, slow down!” His voice was barely audible over the roar of the wind and road.

In response, Lance kicked it up another few mph. His old car groaned under the pressure as the gauge ticked past _92_ to _93_ , but he just patted the dash. “Stay with me old Blue,” he cooed at her, “this one’s for Keith, okay?”

“We’re all going to die,” Hunk wheezed, clinging to the handle on the ceiling above the door for dear life.

“Dude we drove two whole hours to find this abandoned straightaway,” Pidge rationalized, “there are no cars, and no cops for thirty miles in any direction. We’re gonna be fine. Lance, kick it up!” _96_.

“You wanna tap out yet, Keith?” Lance goaded, smirking at Keith, who sat in the passenger seat with his whole face glued to the half rolled-down window, watching the yellow fields race by, bleeding into one giant blur, washed out under the gray fog that followed them all the way inland from the sea. Lance realized this was the farthest from the shore Keith had ever gone, and they were still going farther. “Too fast for you yet?”

“No,” Keith insisted, “a hundred miles an hour.”

“If this car breaks down we’re screwed,” Hunk worried as the engine roared and the gauge ticked past _99_.

“Nah, we’ve got a mechanic,” Pidge shrugged, punching Hunk on the arm. “Besides, she said, “We passed the one hundred marker a second ago.”

 _“WOOO!”_ Keith yelled, leaning out the window, hair whipping out behind him so fast Lance could scarcely see his face, could barely hear his voice over the roar of the window as the air parted around their car, jet engine loud.

“Okay, okay,” Lance said, finally letting off the gas and reaching over to tug at Keith’s arm. “You’re gonna dry your gills out, idiot, get back in here.”

Keith acquiesced readily, his hair permanently ruffled, and turned to Lance with glee bursting out every pore. “I wanna drive,” he blurted.

(So he did.)

(Keith sat on his lap and Lance worked the pedals even though he couldn’t see a thing.)

(Nobody died, but damn they came close.)

 

 

_\- play a sport (any sport)_

 

“I have to admit, I was not picturing archery when I said 'any sport,' but I’d be a liar if I said I didn't like the feel of this bow in my hands.”

“Our options are kinda thin on the ground, here, Keith. I had to pick a sport you're physically capable of.”

Hunk tittered, placing the final touches on their homemade target board before skipping away to hide behind a tree. “Well, I still think he'd have liked knife-throwing better.”

“Knife-throwing?” Keith perked up, lowering his bow for the tenth time as Lance tried in vain to show him how to hold it properly. “That's a thing?”

“Sure is!” Pidge crowed, and slapped the bow down to the forest floor. “Come on, forget archery. Let's hurl some knives with our bare hands!”

Keith considered this for a moment, then pushed her away and raised his bow again, looking through his eyelashes at Lance and then back to his bow. “No, it’s fine,” he decided. “Now show me how to shoot this thing.” So Lance scooted in behind him again and bent his elbows until they were in the right position, showing him how taut to pull the string before releasing, where to look to get the best aim, how to crook his fingers…

“Get a room!” Pidge hollered, and Keith jumped, releasing the string a second early and sending the arrow flying off into the woods.

 

 

_- drive-in movie theatre_

 

“No Hunk and Pidge this time?” Keith asked as Lance loaded him into the car. It had sort of become their ‘thing,’ over the course of the summer, the four of them ticking off items on Keith’s bucket list.

“Nah,” Lance said. “Gave them the night off.”

“Uh-huh,” Keith hummed. “And you’re all dressed up, because…?”

“Just felt like it,” Lance winked, and shut Keith’s car door.

So what if they had to go on a miniature roadtrip just to get to the nearest drive-in theatre that was still open in this day and age. So what if they only watched the first half of the movie before getting distracted and moving into the backseat. Whatever. It’s not like there were rules to this game.

Not gonna lie...

Lance _really_ thought that one was gonna work.

 

_\- stargaze through a telescope_

 

“Um. Pidge.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Pidge..?? What.. _Who?_ ”

“I told you, this is Lance’s boyfriend, Keith.” Lance knew Pidge was gonna be a little shit about this. Poor Matt; he looked to Lance and Hunk for help, and Lance decided to pity him.

“Yep, he’s a mer, he's from the ocean, whatever, can you still sneak us into the planetarium tonight or not?”

“Well, yeah, _obviously_ , but like—we’re coming back to this, right? There’s a backstory, right? Please tell me there is a context to this situation and that I get to hear about it eventually.”

“We’ll see,” Pidge shrugged, and shoved her way into Matt’s open apartment door, beckoning the rest inside.

“Hey,” Keith said to Matt from Hunk’s back where he was hanging on the way in.

“Hello,” Matt echoed blankly, then shrugged and followed them inside. Keith and Matt ended up bonding a lot more than Lance bargained for, huddling together at the telescope and gushing over stars until well beyond four in the morning, and Lance found himself wondering what kind of friends Keith would make if he didn’t have to use Lance as some kind of human proxy. What kind of boyfriend he’d have gravitated toward if he’d simply been born human and grown up on his own. What kind of career he’d choose if that was the life he’d been given. Where he’d be right now…

The next morning Lance sighed as Keith finished pulling the stupid sticky pads from his neck, and turned the mostly crossed-out bucket list over in his hands.

Only one thing left.

Number eight. 

He was gonna have to make this one really, really good.

 

 

_. . ._

 

 

_\- see the monarch butterflies up close when they migrate_

 

“This is insane.” Hunk wrung his hands nervously. “This is certifiably insane, this is worse than the tire swing, even. We’re all insane!”

“I’m telling you, we gotta up the ante. We've tried everything else! We have to get creative! We need to give Keith an experience on land he’ll never forget so he knows without a doubt that land is better than ocean.”

Hunk turned to him the driver’s seat of his truck, eyeing Lance like he’d lost his mind. “You don’t even believe that though!” he complained incredulously, “you would totally live in the ocean if you could, you hypocrite!”

“Not the point,” Lance said. “We’re already here, so everyone just be cool, okay?”

Pidge popped up between their two seats, hanging out over the console to put her two cents in. “And to think that just last fall you were terrified to take Keith into the woods at midnight. I have to admit I’m with Hunk on this one. This is kind of insane.” Lance glanced up at the rearview mirror over Pidge's head, trying to see Keith. But he must’ve still been laying flat in the bed of the truck; all Lance could see through the back windshield was bright blue sky, parked cars, and various people walking through the lot to their shared destination.

“Lance, this is never gonna work!” Hunk hissed, still unwilling to put the car in park despite the fact that they’d been idling in a parking spot for a solid minute now.

“It’s gonna work,” Lance hissed back, reaching over and putting it in park for him, and then taking the keys out of the ignition for good measure. “If anything you’re gonna give us away with your aura of anxiety. I swear, I can literally _smell_ the fear on you. Just follow my lead, okay?”

Hunk groaned, but Lance was already climbing out of the truck.

As the soles of his beat-up converse connected with the asphalt, he took a moment to glance around at the crowded parking lot, trying not to be overwhelmed by how many people were here and reminding himself again why they were doing this even though Hunk and Pidge were objectively kinda right. The end-summer sun was high overhead, and it was a Saturday, so there were lots of people here. It was probably better that way, though. Easier to blend in.

Steeling himself for a day of on-the-go improv, he adjusted the old school Polaroid camera hanging around his neck (which he'd borrowed from Marco under threat of death if he damaged it and the promise to buy him more film) and went to open the back hatch of Hunk’s truck. Keith sat up the second the hatch fell open, his eyes shining. It was obvious he was thrilled as all hell to be here, despite the fact that there were people everywhere. “Lance, look,” he whispered, holding his hand out, palm-down. There was a large monarch butterfly sitting on the face of his watch, and he beat his tail once against the bed of the trunk in his excitement as he leaned in to look at it, his eyes crossing in the process.

Unfortunately, the banging sound startled the butterfly into flight. He watched it go as Hunk pulled the red wagon down, and Lance whispered a reminder to Keith: _“For the love of god, don’t move your tail like that in front of anyone.”_

Together they got him situated in the wagon. They did so conspicuously, loud and laughing, trying to act like this was toootally normal and not weird at all because some of the people in the parking lot were already stopping to stare. By the time they’d gotten Keith’s tail hanging in a way where his fins wouldn’t drag where they spilled over the end of the wagon, a woman in a sundress approached them. Her daughter—a cute little girl with twin pom-pom pigtails with twin blue beads tied around them—hid behind her mom’s leg, gaping at Keith in awe. Lance stepped in front of Keith to greet them.

“I must ask the story,” the woman laughed. “My daughter is obsessed with mermaids. Say hi, Val.”

“Is your tail real?” the little girl whispered to Keith.

“Oh, yeah,” Lance answered before Keith could clam up, as over-the-top and dramatically as he could. “It’s _super_ real. Right Keith?” Then he raised a hand to cover his mouth and whispered to the mom, “I’m a photography student. We’re doing a shoot here for a big school project. It looks real, right? Took us _ages_.”

“That’s so cool,” she giggled, and valiantly pulled her daughter back toward her as her fingertips brushed Keith’s tail, who wasn’t sure what to do except let her. “Okay, say bye bye, Val!”

“Bye mister mermaid,” she whispered reverently, waving at them by opening and closing her whole hand, and then they were gone.

“Amazing,” Hunk whispered as soon as they were gone.

“I cannot believe that worked,” Keith agreed, dazed. He poked at the fin Val had touched.

“What did I tell you?” Lance laughed. “Have some faith in me guys, jeez!”

They wheeled Keith up through the parking lot and onto the trail, acting natural, Lance cradling his brother’s camera close to his chest. People stared, but in a ‘what are those nutty kids up to’ kind of way and not in a ‘holy shit mermaids are real’ kind of way. No one suspected a thing. Always hide in plain sight, baby.

The Natural Bridges Butterfly Preserve was probably one of Lance’s favorite places. Like, okay yeah, he said that about a lot of places, but this one was truly something else. Every year the monarch butterflies passed through California on their migration, and this area was something of a sanctuary for them. It also helped that it was _right_ next to the beach where Keith first kissed him. Lance had always wanted to bring Keith here.

“It’s a nice day, huh?” Lance called over his shoulder, speaking loud over the rumble of the wagon wheels. Keith looked positively drunk on the environment. He had his head thrown back and was staring straight upward, the lattice of sunlight as it streamed through the towering oak trees overhead painting his skin with patches of sun and shallow shadow. The sky was a solid sea of pure, blinding sapphire, unbroken except for two parallel jetstreams crossing the center of the sky, left by planes and steadily fading. The air was cool and breezy despite the waterfall of sunlight, and the sound of people chatting blended easily into the tweets of the birds unseen in the branches and the susurrus of leaves, like windchimes. Lance softened as he looked at Keith’s face, glancing up to see what he was seeing. He didn’t wanna trip (especially since he was the one pulling the wagon) but it was tough not to stare when the trees were all alive with fluttering flecks of black and orange, like sparks of harmless fire on the wind. It was mesmerizing.

“It’s alright, I guess,” Keith said, a small smirk on his lips. “Oh!” He sat up sharply as two monarchs flew by directly over his face, nearly slipping on the thin layer of water that sat in the bottom of the wagon in the process.

“Dude, that’s nothing,” Pidge laughed. “Wait till you’re sitting still. Those things are gonna swarm you.”

They wandered up the path for awhile before diverging from it, deciding to set up near a half-buried stack of boulders just beneath a twisting oak that lay almost on its side. Lance was gonna stick with this ‘I’m a photographer’ cover-story, and that meant taking lots and lots of photos so Keith could relax in peace and really enjoy this without being bothered by anyone, so with Hunk’s help they got Keith out of the wagon and onto the rocks. Keith snickered through the entire process, asking Lance how he should pose.

Lance sneered at him, but despite the fact that this was just a charade so they could take Keith out into a crowded tourist spot without raising and eyebrows, he did put some care into the photos he snapped. He’d never gotten the chance to photograph Keith with a camera this nice before. As he did his thing, snapping photos from the grass a ways away while Hunk and Pidge chatted amongst themselves beside him and dug into the snacks they’d packed, Keith slowly relaxed and forgot he was being photographed, basking in the sunlight the same way he did on the rocks outside the grotto, drinking out of his water bottle every once in a while and discretely splashing some of it on himself. The longer he sat still the more monarchs fluttered down around him, until finally they began to land on him.

“What— Why are they landing on me,” Keith called over to them when the number of butterflies on his tail had grown from five to six and it was officially starting to look like a swarm. Lance giggled, snapping another photo.

“They probably think you’re flowers,” Hunk called back. “It’s all that red on you.”

“They’re confused,” Keith observed. “Go on, shoo…” He made an attempt to wave them away as yet another landed, but only one fluttered off and it just came back a moment later and landed on the arm he’d tried to shoo it away with. _Flash_ , another photo. He laughed at Keith’s attempts to stave off the butterflies as the photo slowly faded into view on the paper. Oh that was a _good_ one.

“Oh my god,” Hunk laughed. “Okay, maybe they just like you.”

Tentatively Keith held his arm out, and several more monarchs landed there, one directly on the crooked end of his pointer finger. Keith pulled his hand in close to inspect it, and Lance quickly snapped a close up. The look on his face was _priceless_.

After a moment of gazing at this butterfly like it was made of pure, condensed starlight, he closed his eyes.

It was a long minute of creased eyebrows and a determined set to his jaw before he opened them again, that look of wonder faded into something wistful. Lance had been watching this through the viewfinder of the camera and snapped a pic the second Keith opened his eyes, before he realized what had happened. The flash scared away the butterfly on Keith’s finger, and Lance took the camera away from his eye, pulling the freshly printed phot out with curiosity that only grew as the seconds ticked by and the picture began to show up on the film. In the photo, the butterfly itself was out of focus in the foreground since he’d focused in on Keith’s face, and his eyes were thrown into stark relief, the irises—normally that deep brownish-purple—were lit up gold. He’d unknowingly caught Keith mid-shift.

Or.. mid-attempt.

Behind him, Hunk and Pidge chattered on amongst themselves. They hadn’t been paying any attention for a while now. Sighing, Lance shouldered the camera by its strap and rose from the grass, crossing to the boulder where Keith was sitting.

A few butterflies departed from Keith’s tail as Lance clambered up beside him, careful not to knock the Nikon against the rock as he went. “So you just tried it again, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty stupid,” Lance said, trying to inject some teasing amusement into his voice. Looking around, there were several large families in immediate sight, one within twenty feet of them and actively watching the ‘photography project.’

“Yeah,” Keith said with the exact same defeated inflection.

Lance glanced over at him. He was staring down at the butterflies crawling on his fins and didn’t even look upset anymore. His eyes were empty. And Lance realized that for Keith to try and pull this stunt here in broad daylight in front of half a hundred onlookers, he was either batshit crazy, or else he never believed it was going to work in the first place.

“It’s okay,” Lance sighed, “we’ll think of something eventually, Keith.” He tucked the camera into his lap, leaning back to gaze at the canopy above them.

Even if this didn’t work, it was still a beautiful day. They were still making a wonderful memory, the four of them. As a little kid walking through fields of butterflies, he’d often thought this place during migration season would make the perfect spot for a date. As a younger teenager coming here he’d often pledged that there’d never be a day when he tired of this view. No amount of growing up was gonna make it any less magical an experience when thirty butterflies landed on you because you happened to wear a shirt with a flower print on it.

“Hey, Lance!” Pidge called out. “Keith!” They looked over, and saw that the woman from the parking lot was now standing beside Hunk and Pidge where they were sprawled out in the grass. The little girl (Val, was it?) was still standing behind her mom’s leg, tugging at the hem of her yellow sundress.

“She wants to take a picture with you guys,” Hunk said, and the woman waved at them with an equal amount of shamelessness and embarrassment. It was clear she didn’t want to bother them while they were working on a school project, but parents will also do anything to make their kids happy.

Lance giggled, then waved Val over excitedly. “Heck yeah! Come on over!”

Her face lit up as soon as she was directly addressed, and she fought through the shyness to skip over to the rocks where Keith and Lance were sitting. Keith visibly tensed as she approached, so Lance shot him a reassuring grin. As long as he didn’t move his tail or his gills it was gonna be fine.

The mom followed her daughter over after thanking Hunk and Pidge, pulling her cell phone out as she came.

“Hey, why don’t you take one on my camera too?” Lance suggested, and grabbed it back from Keith to offer it out to her. “It’s an old Polaroid camera, so she can take the photo home with her.”

“Really? Can I?” The lady beamed at him as she accepted the camera. “This is  _so_ sweet of you, seriously. Do you need some help climbing up, honey?”

“No!” Val exclaimed, batting away her mom before she could even try, then set about climbing up the rocks herself. In the end she had to grab onto Keith’s tail for balance though, and Lance shot a hand out to steady her. Her eyes widened, her hand lingering on the scaly texture, and Lance sent a grateful prayer skyward that she was only like, five, because if any adult touched Keith’s tail they would know in an instant that it was for real. Soft scales curving over sinew and warm blood, reacting to your touch with micro-movements just the same way any other living creature did when touched. It was no different from touching a fish.

“You said your name is Val, right?” Keith asked quietly as she settled in between them. It was cute and awkward, the stilted way he spoke to her, as though he wasn’t exactly certain how to speak to a child. It made Lance’s heart do some really dumb things in reaction, like flutter, and backflip, and melt, and wonder if he'd make a good dad someday.

“Uh-huh.”

“Cool,” Keith said. “That’s cool. Um. I’m Keith. Wait. I think I already told you that. Whoops..”

Lance suppressed a giggle with the back of his hand as Keith looked at him in desperation, a clear ‘ _help me’_ spelled out on his face. Val giggled too, and made no attempt to hide it. It was loud and bubbly, any trace of shyness gone, “You’re funny,” she said.

“Okay, everybody say cheese!”

“Cheese!” Lance yelled, throwing one arm up behind Val jazz hands style, and the other out with a peace sign. Keith kicked his tail up right in time to get Val to gasp in sheer delight right before the flash went off. He sent Lance a smirk right afterward, too, making sure Lance knew he did that on purpose. Damn it all, so Keith was good with kids. Was there anything about him that wasn’t absolutely friggin’ flawless? Probably not.

“You gotta wait a minute before it shows up,” Lance told Val’s mom as she carefully removed the freshly printed photo paper from the camera, eyeing it with interest. “Hey, thanks for posing with us,” Lance told Val. “I bet the picture looks great.”

“Okay, come on honey,” the woman said, walking back over to return Lance’s camera to him. “Let’s let the nice boys finish their project.”

“Okay mom. Gotta tell Keith something though.”

“Oh?” she said, biting her lip and meeting Lance’s eye with a barely hidden smile. “Like what?”

Instead of answering her Val just turned to Keith, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down to her level so she could whisper directly into his ear. _“I’m gonna be a mermaid when I grow up. Just so you know!”_

Keith caught Lance’s eye over her head briefly before looking down again. “Oh. That’s funny,” he said, “cause I’m gonna be a human when _I_ grow up.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice airy and full of pleasant surprise, as though such a possibility had never even occurred to her, as though she’d never thought of being human as something worthy of aspiring to. She was still looking back at Keith thoughtfully as her mom grabbed her under the armpits to help get her down from the rocks.

“It was nice to meet you,” Lance told them as they waved goodbye for the second time, then elbowed Keith, prompting him to give a belated goodbye as well. He was so hopeless.

Lance watched them go, his mind faraway. The little girl was already onto the next little adventure; a butterfly had flown low onto the path and it looked like she was now getting a talk from her mom on walking carefully when the monarchs were flying underfoot like that. After the brief pause, the little girl walked slower, stepping over the butterfly where it had landed with an excessive amount of caution.

Or maybe it _wasn’t_ an excessive amount of caution, all things considered…

Sighing, Lance leaned back on one hand, casting his eyes over the branches, taking note of the exact ratio of orange-to-green. He’d been trying not to think about it too much since they got here. As much as Lance waxed dramatic about every little change in life, the truth was that more often than not, the biggest and most life-altering changes came gradually; it was hard to notice from one year to the next. But looking back at the whole of his life, knowing that this was Keith’s first time at the preserve, seeing this little kid playing with the butterflies like he had done so many years ago for the first time when he was her age, he wasn't able to help comparing Now to Then. And what he saw made his stomach feel heavy, made his heart feel too hot, made him feel kinda like he'd stuck a fork into a socket.

“Are you okay?”

Shaken from his reverie, Lance cleared his throat and averted his eyes from the treetops. “I’m fine,” he replied automatically, but Keith wasn’t stupid, and elbowed him sharply in the gut.

“No you’re not,” Keith said. “You’re disappointed. You thought this would work and I messed it up again.”

“No, it’s actually not that,” Lance admitted. “It’s just..” He looked around the preserve, cataloging the speckles of orange against all the white-brown tree trunks, against the leaves and the grass. There was no mistaking it. “There aren't as many butterflies as there used to be,” he said sadly. “It’s hard to tell from year to year, but I know for sure there were a lot more than this when I was a little kid.”

“Oh,” Keith said, caught off guard by the admission. “Um.. Climate change?”

Lance shrugged, fiddling idly with the camera. “I dunno. I mean, yeah. Probably. That’s probably it. Sorry, I know today is supposed to be about you and I’m dragging this other depressing shit into it—”

“It’s stressing you out,” Keith noted, completely ignoring the second half of Lance’s answer. “I should’ve noticed. I thought you were just stressed about the shifting thing, but this is part of it too, huh.”

“I mean— _yeah,_ ” he exploded, then fell to a whisper again when Hunk glanced over. He threw his hands up in disbelief. “How does it not stress you out?! How is it not what everyone’s thinking about literally all the time?”

“Probably because no one besides you is capable of feeling that much empathy from dawn to dusk,” Keith laughed, taking the camera from Lance’s hand since he’d almost hit it on a tree branch in his wild gesturing. “You just—you can’t turn off that part of your brain,” he huffed with a small laugh, “can you?”

“I guess not,” Lance laughed, but it was strained. “It’s been heavier on my mind lately.”

“Why?”

Huh. He wasn't expecting that kind of a question, especially not so blunt. This was Keith, though.

Lance lifted up his arm, wrist up, letting at the rainbow bracelet the others had given him before they left for the summer flop over and settle again on his skin. It was lightweight, each ‘scale’ poked and threaded together with thin invisible wire that _had_ to have been repurposed fishing line. Touching them, it was impossible to believe it was made of anything but plastic. Cheap, factory-made plastic. “These bracelets,” he said, “that jewelry they wear… I’m pretty sure it’s made of mermaid tears.”

Keith quirked an eyebrow at him, looking at his own matching bracelet. “What?”

“Mermaid tears,” Lance repeated, remembering the first time his family had gone to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Remembering the fishless tank designed to look like the seafloor but filled with discarded bits of colorful plastic, so that it looked more like a pet store aquarium. How he had laughed and pointed at how colorful it was at first, until Marco began reading the description posted underneath it, and how he’d slowly stopped laughing. “Little bits of microplastic that settle on the seafloor. They look like food, so animals eat them, and die. And there's like, _millions_ of tons of them out there on the seafloor. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Oceanographers call them mermaid tears,” he laughed ruefully, shaking the bracelet back into place on his wrist, “which is just.. it’s ironic, isn’t it? All things considered.”

He didn’t even know where all this was coming from. He was having a _good day today,_ he really was. It was just.. This stuff was never far from his mind. It’d always been there on the back burner, ever since he was a little kid. But that was then, and having a backburner on constant low was one thing. That was manageable. _Now_ , ever since meeting the other mer and being forced to confront people who’d been directly impacted by it in ways he couldn’t have imagined, it was like a constant voice of anxiety in the back of his head, in constant threat of boiling over, clamoring for his attention, never sleeping, never letting him rest.

“I guess maybe that’s one of the many reasons I want this shifting thing to work so badly,” he admitted. “It scares me how _badly_ we take care of the place where you live.”

“Well,” Keith threw out casually, "it's not like you guys take care of the 'land' part of the planet much better.”

Snorting loudly, Lance rolled his eyes. Keith was so bad at this, but he knew that was just his messed-up way of trying to cheer Lance up.

Opting to shift the subject back to the problem they actually had tentative control over, Lance sighed and wiggled into a more comfortable position. “I’m sorry, Keith. I really thought this would work.” The last of the butterflies fluttered away from Keith’s tail, off to do whatever it was that butterflies did. They both watched it go.

“I know,” Keith said, and there was something else deep under those words too, hidden and buried and unfathomably heavy.

Lance noted how he didn’t say _‘me too.’_

 

 

. . .

 

 

The ride back was quiet.

Pidge and Hunk seemed more or less oblivious to the atmospheric shift, chatting amongst themselves as they drove back all the way up and out of the city again, to that out of sight spot up north where they'd spirited Keith out of the water away from city eyes. It was a long drive the first time, and it seemed even longer on the second. Lance zoned out, his attention flickering back and forth between the unbroken coastal road, the unbroken blue sky, the extremely broken cliffline, and the rearview mirror. Keith was never looking back at him, no matter how many times Lance found himself checking.

As they neared the turnoff where they'd pull down near the ocean to unload Keith again, Lance reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, inside of which was Keith's folded bucket list. It was deeply creased from spending the whole summer in his wallet, and it tried desperately to hang onto its previous shape as Lance unfolded it, eyes drifting listlessly across the page, wondering what he was doing wrong, what he could be doing better, what he should do next. They'd done literally everything on this list. It just.. wasn't enough. Maybe they could just keep going? Try again? Make a new list? He bit his lip, trying not to think about Hunk and Pidge's pages of notes and how the shifting vitals hadn't changed a bit all summer, just page after page of identical charts, same upward curve, same spike, same eventual drop-off...

As he mulled it over, his eyes trained off the last item on the list, the butterflies. But then, he noticed something. The way the shadow was falling in the paper made it slightly more visible than it would've been otherwise, whic was why he'd never noticed it before, but Keith had originally written another item after the butterflies, and then erased it. He'd erased it good too. Even squinting, Lance couldn't seem to read it. In the end he dug up a pencil from the center console, since Hunk wasn't paying attention to him anyway, and lightly shaded with the dull side of the lead tip over the top of the faint indents in the paper until finally, the words were legible.

  

_\- meet your family_

 

Oh…

Part of him wanted to be hurt that Keith had written it and then erased it like that, but then again, he'd been putting the inevitable meeting off himself for his own personal reasons too, like hogging Keith to himself, and being able to go out late at night without too much suspicion, and not having his parents breathing down his neck about boyfriend things. But... it was more than that, too. In truth, the prospect of his family finally knowing about Keith was scary.

But, looking at Keith’s erased bullet point, he felt his resolve solidify.

It was time.

The truck lurched and tipped as they drove down the sleep slope toward the tiny, deserted beach, and Hunk stopped right as they reached the sand before the tires could get stuck. Before they'd even fully stopped Lance flung his door open and was already slipping out of the passenger's seat. “Hey,” he hummed, hopping up onto the tire to climb the side of the truck, and realizing belatedly that Keith had also said "hey"at the exact same time with the same _‘I gotta tell you something’_ inflection.

“You first,” Lance said, taking in how listless Keith looked sprawled out on the dirty truck bed, his hair a mess from laying down on Hunk's old duffle bag even though he'd sat up.

Keith looked back at the window behind him, seeing that Pidge and Hunk were still inside the truck, then lowered his voice. “I think we should chill on the shifting thing.”

Lance's heart dropped like a bag of rocks. “What, _why?”_

Keith blinked at him. “Is that not what you were going to say?”

“Um _no?”_ Lance clambered up the rest of the way, sitting on the wall of the truck bed. “I was gonna impart on you my Hail Mary idea, actually. Why the hell do you wanna give up all of a sudden?”

“I didn't say I wanna give up,” Keith said, “I just said I think we should chill.”

“You didn't say why though! You can't just say that—”

“Because it's not _working!”_ Keith barked, his carefully calm voice finally breaking.

“And it’s not _gonna_ work if you just stop trying,” Lance shot back. Nothing about this made sense. Was this seriously what Keith had been thinking about the whole way back? While Lance had been digging for another way to try, he’d been deciding to quit? It stung. It hurt. It confused him. It pissed him off. “You didn’t even listen to my new plan—”

“I don’t want to hear another one of your plans!” Keith shouted. Two car doors slammed shut, the rumble traveling through Lance’s legs. Great, now Pidge and Hunk could hear this. Awesome. “Just face it, Lance, these plans suck and they’re not doing anything! It’s not enough!”

He was doing that thing where he lashed out when he was upset. There was a part of Lance that recognized that, but the part that squirmed under the accusation that he wasn’t doing enough was a little louder. “You didn’t even hear my Hail Mary yet,” he accused. “Maybe I’ve been saving the best one for last! Ever think about that?”

“What’s going on?” Hunk worried, peaking around the cab on the other side of the truck.

“We’re brainstorming!” Lance snapped, but his voice broke and Hunk’s face fell a little.

“Lance, look at me.” When Keith spoke this time his voice was surprisingly even given the fact that they’d been borderline shouting at each other. “I know what your Hail Mary is, alright? And it’s not gonna work.”

“How do you know that it won’t?”

“Because I just know.”

“Stop— I fucking hate when you do that!” Lance snapped. “You can’t say _just because_ anymore, I thought we were past that, I thought you were being honest, I thought you weren’t gonna lie by omission anymore—”

“Fine, _fine_ , you know what?” Keith hissed, “ _fine._ You know how I know it won’t work? Because they’re _your_ family Lance! They’re not _my_ family. I don’t fucking have one, okay, and you can’t just fix that by introducing me to yours! They’re _your_ family, Hunk and Pidge are _your_ friends, and all these places you’ve been taking me to, those are yours too! Every item on the bucket list, all these plans, these crazy insane _stupid_ fucking plans— I’ve been having fun this summer, Lance, I really have, but this was _never_ going to work because it’s all _yours_.” His voice stuttered out from a shout into something strained and fettered, like a trapped bird, fluttering, fighting to break free of his chest. It was a fight Keith was losing. “None of it… None of it is mine.”

There was a long moment of silence where Pidge and Hunk just hovered, unsure what to do, whether to say something or wait or just go away.

Finally, Lance spoke. “I guess I didn’t know you felt that way. How the hell was I supposed to know?”

Keith glared. “Stop making this about you! You think admitting this is easy for me? You fucking asked!”

“Wasn’t expecting that answer,” Lance sniffed, and Keith had officially had enough.

“Hunk, get me out of this truck.”

“Um—” Hunk’s gaze fell to Lance and he drummed his fingers on the hatch of the truck, the picture of anxiety, king of wanting to please everyone and pleasing no one in the process. “I don’t wanna like, intervene, you guys—”

 _“Please,”_ Keith snapped, halfway between begging and demanding. “I can’t— Please just get me the fuck out, you have idea how frustrating it is not to be able to move on my own or leave when I want to!”

“Got it,” Hunk said, shifting at light speed into Dad Friend mode. “Say no more.” The hatch popped open and Hunk was up in an instant, heaving Keith up into his arms. He shot Lance an irritated, disappointed look as he did. _(What the fuck did_ _I_ _do? Keith’s the asshole here!)_ The whole truck wobbled under their combined weight and Lance almost tipped off as Hunk jumped down. As Hunk carried Keith around the left hand side of the truck, presumably so he wouldn’t have to pass between Lance and Pidge on his way into the sand, Keith didn’t even look up.

“Great,” Lance muttered. “Perfect.”

“Oh stop,” Pidge said, rolling her eyes and following after Hunk and Keith, leaving Lance alone there on the bed of the truck.

 _Perfect_.

If Keith was the asshole here, then how come Lance felt so guilty?

Ugh. He slid into the bed of the truck the rest of the way, laying down flat on the rusted, dirt encrusted metal where Keith had been laying before despite the fact that there was a great deal of water left behind in his wake—he was a little beyond caring about getting sandy or wet at this point. What did it matter? Lance was always sandy and wet. He was always sandy and wet because his best friend was half-fucking-fish.

When it came to Keith, Lance put up with a lot.

He spent his waking hours inside a damp cave when he could be out in the city living up his youth playing sports and getting into trouble, he spent them shivering and salty when he could be dry and comfy, he spent them lying on the rocks in the hot sun next to Keith when he could be literally anywhere else. There was a certain texture to their world, to the middle of their venn diagram, that sliver of horizon where the water meets the sky. Skin on scale. Cloth on fin. Dry on wet. Water on fire. That last one was hilarious, and Lance had to laugh to himself at the wild absurdity. They were fire and water, he and Keith, and wouldn’t you know it? Lance was the water, and Keith was the fire.

As much as Lance believed they were soulmates, at the end of the day, they weren't literally a package deal. It’d been Keith-and-Lance for so long that maybe sometimes he forgot they were separate people, each coasting along on their own separate trajectories in life. Yeah, they could fly in parallel, but at the end of the day they were technically alone. Everyone was.

Maybe it should’ve made him sad, this realization, but it didn’t. Not really. Wistful, maybe. Gutted. A prelude to a type of sadness he hadn't felt yet but knew someday he would, given enough time. If only there was a word for feeling nostalgic over things that haven’t happened to you yet. If only there was a word for the feeling that grips you when you remember that someday, somewhere down the line, either you or your lover is gonna die first, and you’re forced to confront the fact that no matter how much you love each other or how tightly you hang on, there are some things in this life that you have to do on your own.

“Hey,” Hunk said, his voice disembodied since Lance was laying on his back, staring glassy-eyed at the wide, empty sky. “You wanna get in front, or...?”

“I’ll just hang out back here,” Lance said. “I’ve got some self-reflecting to do, apparently.”

 

 

. . .

 

 

That night, Lance went into his desk and dug out his old walkie talkie.

They scarcely used these anymore, since Keith had to be inside the grotto to use it anyway and Lance much preferred to just make the short walk to talk to him in person. But he felt Keith needed the space, and so it was appropriate. What he wasn’t expecting was the wave of childhood nostalgia that swept over him as he turned it on.

He spoke softly.

“Hey, Keith?”

There was a deep, _deep_ rooted nostalgia in this that only got stronger as he waited for a response. All those nights they spent whispering to each other through disjointed static, staying up late playing stupid word games, telling each other made-up stories, talking about how their days had been when they'd missed each other in the grotto. The walkie talkie was painfully old school, the army green plastic long-since faded from the time he lost it out in the garden for a month, with a big dent right below the 'talk’ button from the time he dropped it all the way down the stairs on accident. It was junk, and he loved it.

The walkie talkie crackled, and Lance moved it closer to his face as Keith's voice came through, muffled and staticky.

“Hey.”

There was a long pause, and Lance sat down on the edge of the bed, cradling the walkie talkie on his lap, wondering if he should speak first or let Keith.

“...Over,” Keith added.

A tired laugh bubbled up out of Lance's chest before he could think twice. As usual, he had no idea if Keith was joking, being sincere, or directly fucking with him. It was probably an equal mix of all three.

He sighed, shifting to lay on his bed with one leg crossed over his knee, walkie talkie hand resting on the pillow by his head. No matter how old he got he'd never had the heart to take down his glow stars, and that was where his gaze gravitated now. How many nights had he counted them, drawing new constellations with his fingers in the air while Keith whispered in his ear?

“It seemed like you wanted some space,” Lance said, opting to just get this all out of the way at once without dragging it on, “which is why I broke out the walkies instead of coming down. I wanted to say sorry. You were right. I thought about it a lot after you left today, and you're right. I've commandeered this whole thing, haven't I?” He let go of the button, and then on second thought, clicked it again and said, “Over.” It was silly and archaic maybe, but it really did make radio communication smoother.

Keith's reply came right away. “It's okay. I'm sorry too. I just… got caught up I guess. You didn't deserve to be yelled at. Over.”

“But you were right,” Lance said. “We’ve been doing this whole thing my way for the whole summer even though it's your life. Over.”

“Maybe. But I went along with it because I wanted to. It was cute. It was _fun_ , you know? I… I was really having fun with you guys. This was probably the best summer of my life. Over.”

Lance rolled over to face the walkie, his voice small and muffled by the pillow when he spoke again. “Is that why you went along with it even though you knew it wouldn't work? …Over,” he added when the silence stretched on for longer than a few seconds.

“Yeah,” Keith said. “Over.”

“Is that it?”

“Lance,” Keith said, “this is something I'm gonna have to figure out on my own. You get that, right? I love that you guys are trying to help, I really do, but this is something I just gotta do alone.”

“I get it,” Lance replied. “I mean, there's stuff I gotta do alone too that you can't really help me with.”

“Ugh, college.” Keith spat the word like it was a curse, and Lance fell to laughing, knowing it was a joke, relieved that they were out of the apologies and back in joking territory. “And.. your other thing,” he added. Carefully. Tentatively. “Whatever that is.”

“...Right,” Lance said, his heart squeezing a little because Keith had never directly addressed that before but he knew what Keith meant, and Keith _knew_ that Lance knew what he meant. Ugh. He didn't wanna say the words. _Anxiety? Depression? The ever-present soul-crushing fear that nothing I ever do will matter on the grand scheme of things, so why bother?_ “College,” was all he said, opting to ignore the second thing entirely. “So are we okay? Over.”

“Of course we're okay,” Keith hummed, his voice rich and soothing. “I just.. need to do this my own way now. No more list items, okay? Over.”

“Even my Hail Mary? Over.”

“I'm sorry Lance,” he whispered. “I just… can't. Not yet. I will, just, not yet. Over.”

“I'm holding you to it,” Lance said, then let out a big yawn. School was starting up again next week, and he was trying to get his sleep schedule back in order before then. Senior year, baby. Woo. “I’m gonna go to bed,” he said. “Goodnight Keith, I'll see you tomorrow. Love you. Over.”

“Alright, same time as usual then. Over.”

As always, Lance tried not to let it get to him how Keith never said it back; he knew that Keith loved him in his own way, and he'd say it whenever he was ready. It didn't get to him.

But man… Oh, man, he really hated the word ‘over.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is coming to you from a very important place in my heart, and i promise i will not let you down with where it's going.
> 
> [twitter](twitter.com/speak_swords)  
> [tumblr](speakswords.tumblr.com)


	6. The Drop-Off

“LANCE!” Hunk bellowed, nearly breaking Lance’s knees as he fell on him, followed soon after by Pidge.

"Woah, someone's got eyebags," Pidge laughed, "did you sleep at all?"

"Nah, I was up late with Keith.” He pulled at the skin under his left eye with his fingertip. They weren’t really that bad, were they? He needed to be awake on his first day. This was senior year of high school and he wanted to make a splash—needed to, especially in his first class of the day, AP Marine Bio.

Usually, the buzz of excitement that permeated the student body on the first day of school fueled him for weeks at the beginning of every school year before he’d eventually burn down to a steady flame. But honestly… he had a feeling that exterior buzz wasn’t going to penetrate his skin this year. And as he settled in a desk as the warning bell ringed, poking at the syllabus waiting there for him, he realized that this year, he was going to have to generate his own buzz from somewhere within. No more feeding off other people’s energy.

“Goood morning!” Mr. Lewandowski (according to the whiteboard) announced cheerily as he closed the door after the last straggler. “One out of five of you are going to switch out of this class before next semester, so if you don’t want it to be you, I suggest you pay attention as we go over the syllabus…”

So, unlike the Lance of previous years, he made a concerted effort to pay attention for the rest of the first day of senior year.

But it tasted strange.

When Lance was young he’d always looked forward to this time of his life. A magical aura surrounded the entire concept of senior year; the way people spoke of it was always with an air of wistful reverence. Senior year was an in-between, like the moment in a rollercoaster when you tick over the crest and hover for a split second before rocketing downhill. Before he met Keith, he was expecting his own senior year to be a continuous overlapping string of fun friend-filled days, cramming for tests, staying up late, and driving around town in an old car. A love affair with a pretty girl with long eyelashes and a quick wit. He and Hunk and Pidge would fall asleep at each others’ houses on accident. Lance would get into the best university in the whole country, whichever one it was, and run screaming into the kitchen with the paper crumpled in his shaking hands, and his family would cry, and he’d get to make a speech at high school graduation because he was Valedictorian, and everyone would throw their caps in the air, just like they did in the movies. He’d make everyone proud.

But then Keith came, and that changed everything.

That’s alright. Just edit the expectations a bit, yeah? Senior year would be a little wet, probably, just like all his other years. It’d be a little bit of sand always clinging to the bottom of his shoes. A little bit of climbing back into his window at 2am and shivering violently as he peeled the freezing wetsuit off his body because he'd been an idiot and gone swimming in the lake just because Keith looked at him Like That again. A lot of forgetting to do homework because he had better things to do. A lot of soaking up the last of his childhood with his oldest childhood friends. A lot of Keith.

Of course, life never turned out the way he expected it to, even when he accounted for all the variables.

Senior year didn’t turn out like any of those things.

 _You have your own stuff to deal with too,_ Keith had said as they laid out together on the rocks in the moonlight, the night before senior year began. _It’s not like I’m the only one. You have college applications, you have three AP classes this year, and you have to do well so you can get that internship…_

And Lance had only sighed, tracing the faint silver outline of a cloud with his eyes. _I was gonna work all that stuff in around you._

 _All I’m saying is that you should focus on school, and I should focus on finding my own way to shift. It’s not like we’re not going to still see each other all the time,_ Keith had huffed, half amused and half mortally offended. _We’re next door neighbors._

A tired smile had passed over Lance’s face then in the same way a breath might, coming and going. He’d rolled his head to the side to look at their hands where they were clasped together. _Yeah,_ he said. _I guess we are, huh?_

So that was that.

They still saw each other, but Lance consciously turned his focus on school, and Keith on shifting.

The exact nature of Keith’s daily activities escaped Lance. Keith’s response to curiosity and inquiry about what he was doing to pursue the shift that he couldn’t have done with Lance’s help tended to be short and dismissive. “I’m figuring it out,” he liked to say, and Lance would huff and jokingly respond, “Well, figure it out faster, slowpoke, I’m getting old!” And they would let it go and enjoy whatever spare minutes they had to share.

But at night sometimes Lance would lay awake on his bed, flicking that whalebone knife Keith had given him so long ago open and closed, and wondering. Trying to imagine what the hell Keith was up to.

He began to get some sort of idea, about halfway through the first half of the school year, when Keith began disappearing for a few days at a time during the week. Lance considered bugging him about it, but in the end decided that if Keith wanted to tell him where he was going for days at a time, he would.

Of course, the farther they got into the school year, the longer Keith vanished during the week, until the only time Lance was absolutely certain they'd get to see each other was on Saturdays.

So yeah. They didn’t get to see each other a ton. It didn’t feel as bad as it should have, maybe, because Lance’s own waking hours were mostly filled to the brim with other new agenda items that he hadn’t devoted much time or thought to before this year. Things like sucking up to teachers so he’d have people to write reference letters, and working extra hours to save up so he’d be able to afford to live a little closer to the campus next year, and volunteering at the local animal shelter cleaning out the cages and playing with the animals so he’d have volunteer work to put down on his SLRC internship application. It was pretty competitive, getting in at the ground floor there, and he really, really wanted it. He _needed_ it. The prospect of that internship swiftly became his driving force, fueling him through midnight studying sessions, through test-cramming, through the hair-pullingly hard-to-write personal statement essay for his college application, through those awful weekends where he didn’t get to see Keith at all because he was just so friggin’ busy. Between classes he often jogged to his AP Marine Bio teacher’s classroom to ask him questions about this or that, to make sure he was on the right track, until finally one day he told Lance to just calm down, and that there was only _so much_ a person could do to prepare for something before it was redundant and useless.

Whatever. Lance was perfectly calm, thanks! And nothing he _ever did_ was useless, _thanks_ , he had this all under control and he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Your application essay was really good,” his English teacher told him in the second week of January. He’d started going back to his old favorite teacher Sabbagh for help after Lewandowski told him to calm down in second quarter, and he was better off for it (although somewhat surprised that Sabbagh had agreed so readily to extra work that he didn’t technically have to do). “A few grammatical things, which I marked for you, but otherwise.. It was actually pretty riveting.”

“Really?” Lance beamed at the praise; Sabbagh was like a _god tier_ writer. He’d been a college professor and even written books before coming to teach high school English just for kicks, out of a simple passion for teaching younger students. Absolute legend. “You think I’ll have a chance at the internship if I turn this in?”

“I may not know anything about marine biology or oceanography,” Sabbagh said, adjusting his glasses and sitting forward to cross his hands under his chin, “but you’re incredibly well-spoken when it’s something that you care about, and your unshakeable passion for the subject shines through in every word. They’d be fools to ignore passion like that.”

Lance gratefully took his paper back as Sabbagh pushed it across the minimal desktop. “Thanks again for the help, I know it’s not really your job and I don’t even have you this year, so—”

“It might not be my job,” Sabbagh interrupted, a slight smile tugging at his normally stoic face, “but it’s my _passion_ , so, no problem.”

“Thanks,” Lance said, and tucked the paper into his backpack before zipping it up and throwing it over one shoulder. It was the end of the day, so no warning bells rang to kick him into gear, and he must have lingered a second too long at Sabbagh’s desk because suddenly the teacher was leaning forward and setting his pencil down.

“Is there anything else on your mind?” he prompted.

Lance shifted his weight from foot to foot, wondering if this was too much. Too personal.

Lately, Lance had noticed that the jogger who’d been jogging past his house down Cliff Drive almost every day since he was twelve had taken to walking instead of jogging on the weekends, and that on these days, he wasn’t alone. He had _Mr. Sabbagh_ with him. Lance had double-taked comically the first time he’d noticed, because not only was he smacked on the head by the surrealness that always accompanied stumbling across a teacher outside of school, but the two of them were also holding hands. And they looked... happy. The two of them fit like they were part of the scenery, indescribably content to be alive and here and walking with each other hand in hand by the cliffside, and as he watched the jogger fall into a fit of laughter at something Sabbagh had said, the raucous sound carrying over the late afternoon Cliff Drive traffic, Lance was flooded with a keen and agonizing jealousy. He couldn’t help imagining himself and Keith in their place at some indeterminate point in the future, happy and married in their early thirties, all the stresses of the present day far behind them, nothing more than distant memories buried in their wake. He couldn’t help desperately wondering how _anyone_ got there from here. How did anyone navigate the nightmare labyrinth that was life, love, and the pursuit of happiness? _How do you get to happily ever after? Where’s the fucking map?_

“Lance?”

_Shit. Snap out of it._

“Sorry, I zoned out for a sec,” Lance laughed. “No, I’m good, I’ll let you know if I need any more help, okay?”

Sabbagh sat back in his chair, picking up his coffee mug to hide his amusement behind as Lance ducked his head and hurried out of the classroom.

It was fine. Lance didn’t need help or advice or someone to steer him toward the answers.

He could make it there on his own.  


 

 

**. . .**

  


 

“Lance! Hey Lance!”

“Nng,” Lance groaned, and rolled back over in bed. It was no use though. His door slammed open, and then something slammed into his ribcage at Mach 5.

“Lance, wake up,” Benito hollered in his ear, and Lance was confused because he didn’t remember his little brother having that many knees and elbows.

“You have a letter!” Gabi hollered even louder, and ah, that made more sense.

“Get off,” Lance grumbled, shoving at them sleepily, but they were a lot bigger than they used to be and with their combined forces they began to drag him out of bed. He glanced longingly at the walkie talkie half protruding from under his pillow; he wouldn’t get to say good morning to Keith now. This had better be good. “What are you guys yelling about? _Vas a dislocar mi brazo_ , it’s too early for this…”

“We said you have a letter, _estupido,_ ” Beni said as they reached his door, “but Mamá says you have to open it downstairs.”

“A letter...? OH!” Lance said, waking up all at once. He shook off his younger siblings and ran for the stairs, vaulting down them three at a time and slamming right into Laura as she rounded a corner on the first floor.

“Oi!” Laura yelled, shoving Lance into the wall for revenge as they righted themselves. He didn’t care, he was a man on a mission.

“Mamá?” he called as he entered the kitchen, and found both his parents sitting at the dining table with their breakfasts, a little pile of mail resting at the empty seat between them. Lance skipped over and plucked the top one off the pile, the blocky red SLRC logo in the corner calling his name and sending a flurry of nerves spiraling into his stomach.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Laura said, grabbing the collar of Lance’s t-shirt as he turned to abscond with his letter, “we wanna know what it says!”

Lance huffed. “Do I _have_ to open it in front of you guys?”

“We always open important letters as a family,” Papá said, pointing his toast at Lance. “That’s the rule. You know this.”

“Yeah, but.. but what if I didn’t get it.”

“I fail to follow your logic.”

Lance glared, pouting his lower lip out. His career plan, life trajectory, self-worth, and sense of purpose were _all_ riding on whatever was sealed in this envelope, and he didn’t want anyone to see him break down if this was a rejection letter. Was that so much to ask for?

“Lance,” Laura said, “just open it.”

“Fine,” Lance relented, and his entire family (minus Marco, of course, who didn’t live here anymore) pressed in around him as he tore open the envelope. He unfolded the paper as fast as he could manage with shaking fingers, but he didn’t end up reading more than the first few words.

 

_Leandro S. Lacoste-McClain,_

_Congratulations! We are pleased to—_

 

“Yes!” Laura screamed, and he had to press one hand to his ear as she jumped up and down, ripping the paper from his hands. “I _told you_ you had it in the bag, you stupid worry wart!”

“You’re crinkling it,” Gabi scolded, and snatched the letter away from one very overexcited Laura who was borderline bowling Lance over.

“Congrats, mijo,” Mama hummed as the family closed in for a congratulatory hug, and for the first time all year, Lance truly felt like he had figured something out. A heavy weight fell away from his shoulders as the impact settled. _I got in. I’m gonna be working at the Sealife Rehabilitation Center next year. I’m gonna be doing something worthwhile._ An excited giggle bubbled up out of his chest at the prospect of interning at the exact place he wanted to work at once he graduated. Before now, he hadn’t let himself dwell on it too terribly hard, in case he didn’t get in. But now that he did… His entire life stretched out before him, an elaborate tree of events wherein he made a lasting impact on the world and his life on Earth meant something. And it all started here.

Things were finally falling into place for him, and he couldn’t wait to tell Keith.

It was early spring, and the wildflowers that dotted the cliffside were all awake and thriving in full bloom, green, gold, and lavender. The misty breeze rolled against the cliffside pleasantly, making the sea of flowers dance as he descended to the grotto later that morning, as soon as he could escape from his family. He was supposed to be volunteering at the shelter this morning and meeting Keith closer to noon, and there was a basset hound set for adoption that he’d really wanted to say goodbye to... but, he simply couldn’t bear to wait that long before sharing the good news.

However, when he slipped out of the sunlight and into the cool damp air of cave, he was met with yet another pleasant surprise.

The Arctic trio was back.

When he first skipped over to the lake to see if Keith was home, he saw _four_ colorful shapes down there instead of just one red-and-white one. For a split second, he was confused, until he remembered it was the right time of year for them to be migrating back north along the coastline again. It was a little earlier than last year, so he hadn’t been thinking about it at all, especially the way he’d been preoccupied with school and college-prep and the internship. After a moment of thought, he folded up the acceptance letter and tucked it into his pocket before kneeling at the edge and sticking his hand in the water, making a decent splash to grab their attention.

Three of the four shapes rocketed to the surface between one second and the next; they breached and then fell over each other to pounce at the edge of the lake nearest to Lance where he was crouched at the edge of the water, splashing an ungodly amount of water up over the ledge and onto Lance’s shoes, like Koi at feeding time. He laughed and sat down cross-legged to greet them, showing them his mermaid-tear bracelet when Romelle leaned in not-so-subtly to poke at his wrist and check, to assure them that _yes_ he had kept it and _yes_ he still loved it. They clicked at him excitedly for a few more seconds before remembering to switch to English for his sake. After that, it was a parade of over-personal hellos. Romelle pointing out that Lance’s hair was longer than it was last year and showing him that hers was too, Coran attempting to assuage with not just words but also scrutinizing eyes and _very_ pokey fingers that Lance was still in good, youthful health, Allura asking if there were any new developments with the shifting thing because “Keith is being _oh-so_ tight-lipped about it—”

“Um,” Lance said, his mind briefly flashing over the last year in a whirlwind montage—the exuberance of their summer adventures, the blowout fight, the decision to let Keith go it alone, the inevitable distance it had put between them. How had it already been an entire year since he learned about shifting? How had the time flown so quickly since he and Allura had spoken of her parents and her love affair off the coast, sun-bathing together in his kayak? Since Lance had learned there might be hope for a future with Keith, and simultaneously learned that he might have none at all? As this washed over him afresh, his eyes caught on Keith’s where he was loitering behind the three mer in the center of the lake, and then snapped his attention back to Allura. “No,” he rushed, “not really. I mean yeah, but... also not really.”

“Oh,” Allura sighed, “I see.”

“Anyway!” Romelle exclaimed loudly, in an obvious attempt to steer the conversation out of depressing waters. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. We told the whole pod up north about you, and they’re all rooting for you. It’s very sweet, actually. They will all be begging for news of you when we return this year, I have no doubt.”

“Yes, even my parents were enamored by the tale,” Allura said, resting her head on Romelle’s shoulder.

Keith snorted, turning over in the water and letting his tail slap the surface. He’d never been much into love stories as a general concept, so it was probably the bane of his existence that _that_ was what he’d become to an entire group of people somewhere in the world.

“Do you mind if we kidnap Keith for the day?” Coran asked. “He said today was Lance Day—not sure what that means—so we feel bad for stealing him away, but we do have much to catch up on, and he’s woefully out of practice with his Mer so it would do him some good to speak it for a while.”

“I— yeah, I guess,” Lance said, even though his entire heart was now deflating. Lance Day, huh? He smirked at Keith fondly as Keith finally drifted up to the ledge with the others. Inwardly, he also thought of Saturday as Keith Day. Since they were both busy doing their own thing this year, it had become unspoken law that no matter what, they still always tried to meet on Saturdays. So yeah, it kind of sucked that their Arctic friends had to show up on a Saturday of all days, especially when Lance had a good news wildfire burning a hole in his pocket. “I kinda had something important to tell you though,” Lance said to Keith.

“You can tell me when we get back, okay?” Keith whispered to him as he jumped up onto the edge to kiss Lance just off the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Lance agreed. “Sure.”

The four of them dove up and over, leaving the water a roiling mess in their wake. It was several minutes before the surface had calmed into a smooth, glassy plate again, and Lance spent the whole time watching it with glossed over eyes, documenting the fade of every miniature wave until they were all gone and the lake was clear again, the sharp glare of sunlight from the cave’s entrance slicing through to the very bottom. He sighed to himself, squinting as the water redirected a glint of sun right into his eye. It was always weird being alone in the grotto. This was basically Keith’s house, and it was strange to be here when Keith wasn’t. It felt like trespassing, somehow, even though that sounds silly, especially when Lance furnished the entire above-water part of the grotto himself. The above-water part was, in a way, just as much Lance’s as it was Keith’s.

But the underwater part was irrevocably Keith’s. Lance spent a lot of time in the lake, obviously, but he would mostly tread water near the surface; he couldn’t go down all that deep before the pressure began to get uncomfortable, and he couldn’t hold his breath longer than a few preciously short minutes at a time anyway, so it’s not like there was much point. He certainly couldn’t hang out down there the way Keith could topside.

He kind of wished he could, though. If he could, then he would go actually go on these adventures with Keith and the Arctic trio, wherever it was that they went, and participate in whatever it was they got up to, and hear whatever it was that they talked about in the long hours they spent out in the harbor together. The underwater part of Keith’s life had always been somewhat of a mystery to Lance, no matter how much Keith attempted to put words to it for his sake. There were only so many ways to describe the nebulous loneliness of the open ocean, and the ancient drum of life and death that plays on your eardrums when you stumble on a decaying whale at the bottom of the sea, and the moments of wonder when you come across creatures you cannot name and will probably never see again. These things had always been foreign to Lance, and perhaps they always would be. The thought of such an eventuality came with a wistful sadness, sneaking into his lungs like cold morning fog.

As he looked on over the water, daydreaming, watching the fattest orange starfish slowly wiggling its way across the cave floor, his eyes caught on something he didn’t recognize in the familiar landscape. Nestled among Keith’s tide pool pets, various trinkets, and haphazardly cared-for plants, a shiny silver glint of light flashed at him from a patch of loose sand.

Huh. What was that?

Focusing in on the sliver of silver, he leaned out over the edge of the water, careful not to slip in, watching the way the silver thing caught another glint of sunlight. So it was metallic and reflective. New harbor trash of some kind? But then, why did Keith _bury_ it? For a minute he simply sat there, pondering the mystery, tapping his fingers on the ledge with growing impatience.

In the end, curiosity got the better of him.

Nervous and fidgety, worrying he was crossing some kind of boundary but unable to stop himself, he stripped out of his shirt and dropped it onto one of the chairs, then kicked his socks and shoes off. Then, before he could second-guess it, he grabbed his goggles from the shelf, snapped them on, took a deep, grounding, reassuring breath, and dove into the water.

The water was as freezing as ever, but the swim down was easy without any waves in the still cave; the only unnatural force moving the water in here was Lance as he kicked his way down through the steadily mounting pressure, all the way to the cave floor far below. It was tough to see down here since the water wasn’t totally translucent, and Keith never turned the underwater lights on during the day, but even still, the silver mystery was easy to zero in on. Every time Lance moved it glinted in the sea-filtered sunlight. When he got to it, he set about digging it up from beneath the sand and pebbles. But a flash of pain rent through his curiosity.

He pulled back, startled, watching the cloud of red spill out around his hand. Shit, he’d sliced his hand open on it! He cinched his lips shut so he wouldn’t have to taste it, and went back to digging up the offending object with renewed vigor. Only when he’d freed it from its sand prison did he understand why he’d cut himself. As he looked at it, a flurry of bubbles escaped his mouth in confusion, and his lungs began to burn.

That was his cue. He kicked off the cave floor, shooting back to the surface, gasping for breath as his face hit sweet, sweet oxygen again.

Panting, he steadied himself on the ledge with his uninjured hand, pulling the knife up out of the water with his other. Because that’s what this was.

Keith’s knife. His mom’s parting gift before she left him and his dad forever, and the one connection he had to his past and a potential family, somewhere out there in the world. The only relic he had from his life before Lance.

 _That_ knife.

On second thought, he switched hands, using his uninjured one to dunk the knife back in the water to wash his blood off of it. Confused, afraid to understand, he turned the knife over in his hand, ignoring the loud sting of salt water still sitting in the fresh gash on his palm like a thousand microscopic fires. As he traced his eyes over the mysterious amethyst carving on the hilt, the truth of the matter clicked into place whether Lance was ready for it or not.

  


 

**. . .**

  


 

When Keith came home two hours later, alone, Lance was still waiting.

“Hey,” Keith said, the moment he surfaced and zeroed in on Lance where he sat at the table, still sort of dripping due to his excursion and the fact that he hadn’t restocked the grotto with dry clothes in several weeks. He hadn’t wanted to miss Keith’s return just for the sake of being dry and warm. “I smelled _blood_ in the water, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lance said, curling his hand tighter around the gauze he’d wrapped it in from the same first aid kit they’d used when they were ten, then lifted his hand to show Keith. “Just cut myself, that’s all.”

Keith snorted. “On _what?_ ”

“Come see for yourself,” Lance mumbled, glanced down at the table where the knife lay in front of him. Curious, Keith craned his head, but ultimately couldn’t see it from the water, so he pulled himself up onto the ledge and then into the chair across from Lance. “Why do you look so depressed,” he prodded as he did this, “I was only gone for like— _Oh_.”

The second he’d settled in the chair and he saw the knife, he clammed up. For a moment he looked caught in the headlights. Guilty. Terrified. And then, his face went blank. An invisible portcullis slammed shut between them, and he looked up at Lance with zero emotion betraying his inner thoughts.

“Why did you bury this?” Lance asked, ignoring the glaring red _STOP, GO NO FARTHER_ signs Keith was throwing up.

“I— because I don’t need it,” Keith huffed. “I have other knives. And it’s—”

“Your mom’s,” Lance finished for him. He wasn’t buying any of this bullshit. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen Keith use this knife in months and months… he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen it at all. “The one she got from her family.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want it anymore,” Keith snapped defensively, his nostrils flaring. “I never asked for it in the first place, and it wasn’t your place to dig it up.”

“Okay,” Lance said, carefully watching Keith’s face, raking his eyes over his every micromovement, searching for a crack in the ice to leap onto. “Well if you don’t want it anymore, then I’ll just take it and throw it away, yeah?”

“You— what?”

Staring at Keith pointedly, Lance grabbed the knife and stood, making like he was gonna tuck it into his pocket.

“Wait!” Keith cried out, lunging across the table before Lance could complete the action, seizing his wrist before he’d even fully risen from his chair. The result was Lance hunched over the table as Keith lay sprawled across it, his fins flashing a flurry of redyellowblue in swift succession as though he was genuinely afraid, or in some kind of danger. It tore at Lance’s heart. Of course he wasn’t _really_ gonna throw the knife away, and as he cocked his head at Keith and huffed at the fact that Keith had fallen for the ruse so absolutely, Keith clued into Lance’s game and began to wilt back into his chair. The lights faded, and the fear on his face ebbed to embarrassment, and then quiet shame. “Fine,” he admitted, “so I don’t want it gone.”

“Because...?” Lance prompted, lifting the knife between them, forcing Keith to look at it.

Of course, he underestimated how stubborn Keith could be when he wanted. He pressed his lips together tightly, choosing to remain silent. Ah, the eternal elephant in the room. It always came back to this. Somehow, it always came back to this, and today Lance knew for sure that they couldn’t choose to ignore it any longer, no matter how desperately they both wanted to. The scales had tipped. It was no longer easier to ignore it; sometime over the last year it had become agonizing. It was killing them slowly.

“Keith,” Lance said slowly, setting the knife back down on the table and sliding it toward him with one gentle finger. The scrape of metal on plastic was deafening in the silence that divided them. It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t bother phrasing it as one. There was no point. This was a fact that both of them knew. “ _This_ is the thing that’s stopping you.”

“I _know!_ ” Keith burst all at once, slamming his hand palm down on both the knife and Lance’s hand to stay their motion, to stop that horrible scraping noise. “That’s why I was _trying_ to get rid of it!”

“But you didn’t.”

Keith let out a long, desperate growl, threw his head back, and then dropped his face forward into his hands. Biting his lip, Lance released the knife.

“Look, we should ask the other mer about this,” he said. “See what they have to say. See if they recognize it.”

“But what if they do?” Keith whispered. He sounded almost as blindly hopeful as he did terrified.

Lance sat back in his chair, sighing deeply, and shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” His hand brushed on something soggy, and he pulled it out with curiosity before realizing with a shock that he’d left his folded acceptance letter in there when he jumped in to retrieve the knife. It was a solid square of congealed, wet paper now, half dried. Shoot.

“What’s that?” Keith asked, eyeing it as Lance pulled it out, trying and failing to unfold it.

“Ahh, nothing I guess,” Lance sighed, and tossed it over his shoulder.

It was just a piece of paper anyway.

  


 

**. . .**

  


 

The rest of the day went by in a detached haze. He went home to call the SLRC and formally accept the internship, made sure to call Hunk and Pidge too to tell them the good news, and then made a late appearance for his weekend volunteering at the shelter. The basset hound he’d wanted to say goodbye to was already gone, but it was okay. She went to a good home, and she wasn’t gonna miss Lance, so he should be happy. Still, he ended up leaving after only an hour, tired and kinda lonely after cleaning out her empty cage, and even though he was pretty sure Keith would be out with the Arctic trio, his legs carried him back to the grotto instead of to his bedroom. He was fully expecting to find the grotto empty.

What he wasn’t expecting was to find them all out of the water, lounging around on the ground behind the table, chattering excitedly and pouring over something on the ground between them that Lance couldn’t see. Excitement and nervousness fought for control as he made his way over to them. They were probably talking about Keith’s knife, right? They were so loud and excited as they all tried to speak at once in those high-pitched clicks that they didn’t even notice Lance’s entrance. Only when Lance got to them and crouched by Keith, putting one hand on Keith’s shoulder, did Keith notice he’d arrived.

“Lance!” Keith said, breathless and elated. The purity of that sound did _wonders_ to ease Lance’s fears; it had been ages since he’d heard Keith this excited about anything. Curious, he looked down, and was met with surprise when he didn’t see the knife there in the middle of the group. That wasn’t what they were huddled over at all.

No; it was a map.

Specifically, it was the small 16” x 20” map that Lance had brought down here like seven or so years ago when they first met, so he could show Keith where it was that his friend Shiro might have gone off to. The map was pretty worn, but Lance had gotten it laminated in the intervening years to keep it from decaying any further, and so it was preserved in a perpetual half-life, crisp and shiny on the outside, sea-worn and ragged beneath. A _click_ sound grabbed his attention, and he looked up at Coran just in time to see him popping the lid back onto one of Keith’s sharpies. What...

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Enlightenment!” Coran exclaimed, and then he picked up Keith’s knife from between him and Romelle and waved it around excitedly. “There’s only one pod that uses this sigil, my dear boy. They don’t migrate like the rest of us. I wonder how your mother got so very far from them in the first place?”

“She was something of a black sheep,” Keith said simply.

“So where are they?” Lance asked in disbelief. He was almost afraid to know.

“The southern tip of the continent,” Allura explained, and pointed at the map, where a fresh black ‘X’ had been drawn on off the coast of South America. “I believe your human boundary lines have that shoreline marked as ‘Chile.’”

“It’s Chile,” Lance replied automatically, detachedly, gently correcting her pronunciation. Then, it processed. “ _Chile?_ ” he wheezed. “Jesus, that’s so _far_.”

“Could you tell me exactly where they were?” Keith pressed.

“Unfortunately, no,” Coran said. “They are a somewhat reclusive and secretive people—ah, now that I think about it, I should have known right away you had descended from them! Ha!” He chortled at his own joke before clearing his throat and continuing. “I’m afraid if you want to find them, you’ll simply have to go off and look for them yourself.”

Aaand there it was.

There it was.

Of course it was Coran—lovable, tactless, tone-deaf Coran who had never learned how to read a room—who came out and said the words that Lance and Keith had danced circles around for years, never speaking them for fear of the power they held. But there they were. Out in the open, now.

“...Right,” Keith said, keeping his head down, ensuring that the expression on his face was hidden by the sweep of his hair. “Right.”

Romelle hummed, leaning into Lance’s personal space so far to get a look at his face that he had to catch himself on his hand as he pulled away from her more sharply than he meant to. “I think we’ve committed another human faux pas, Coran.”

“Have we?”

“Yes,” Allura scolded. “We have. Oh, for the love of… I see that we three are as tactless as ever,” Allura sighed, and rested on hand gently on Lance’s shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “This is a huge discovery, and I know it’s a lot to take in. We’ll leave you two to digest it.”

Numbly, Lance nodded at the map. In his periphery, there was the flipping of tails and then a series of splashes, but the only thing he could see was that little black X. Everything else was white noise.

Chile.

How far away was that, going through the open sea? How many thousands of miles? How many leagues of black ocean void? How many months?

“Lance?” Keith prompted. His voice was small in the silence. Tentative.

“Chile,” Lance said. It felt like the only word he knew.

“Yeah. Chile. It’s…”

“Exciting?” Lance tried. He wanted to be excited. He really did. This was life-changing for Keith. It was amazing. It was amazing, right? Was it supposed to be this painful?

“Yes,” Keith latched on, “yes, it is, it’s so— I can’t believe it! They actually knew what this symbol meant, it’s like—like—”

“Fate?” Lance offered.

“Yes!” Keith burst. “It’s like fate, Lance. Doesn’t it feel like destiny or something, that I found out where to find my family the very same day you got your foot in the door for your dream job?”

“I— I guess,” he struggled, but then froze. “Wait.” He hadn’t even told Keith about that yet.

A flicker of guilt passed over Keith’s face, and he bit his lip, reaching toward the ledge and dragging his satchel toward him, opening it up to pull his favorite bottle out. It was filled with all sorts of random trinkets, and among them was a little roll of white paper. Lance squinted at it. Was that his acceptance letter?

“Do you mind if I keep it?” Keith mumbled. “You said you were gonna throw it away, but I want it.”

Lance furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “Why?”

Keith curled his arms toward his tail, tucking the bottle and the letter inside protectively behind a tailfin, as if he was afraid Lance would try and take it or something. “I thought I could take it with me, maybe, as a reminder of what you’re doing while I’m away.”

The grotto wobbled dangerously around Lance, and he found himself reaching out to steady himself on the ground even though he was already as low as he could get. Every molecule in his lungs screamed in protest. The urge to support Keith and the urge to _keep_ him fought a bitter battle, and Lance stalled for time, unsure which would win. Unsure which deafening words were going to come billowing out of him.

It occurred to him, as he watched Keith bite his lip, his tail flopping anxiously against the grotto floor as if preparing to dart away, that Keith would probably stay if Lance begged him to.

But he could never ask such a thing of Keith, and nothing else Lance could possibly think to say would change Keith's mind. He didn't want Keith to go do this. (Of course, of _course_ , he did want Keith to find his family if there was one out there to find, but _Lance_ was Keith's family too, and he was here, and swimming blind to the southern tip of South America alone was just insane). So yes, he wanted Keith to stay. But he wanted him to stay on his own volition. He wanted Keith to choose him, and this, with no regrets or sacrifices or missed opportunities. And yeah, maybe that desire was selfish. Selfish, yet true. But the fact of the matter was that Keith wouldn't let this opportunity pass him by unless Lance asked him to, because it was too important to him, and Lance _couldn't_ ask him to for the same exact reason. And that was that. The argument was over before it had even begun. What could Lance even do other than flounder teary-eyed in a pool of cold denial?

“You're not _really_ thinking about it are you?” he pleaded. “Chile. Fucking _Chile,_ Keith.” This wasn’t a hypothetical anymore; it was a real place, an X on a map, and it was farther than Lance ever would have imagined in his worst nightmares.

Keith’s tail flopped over again. “I won’t be gone forever.”

“But you'll be gone.”

“Lance, please,” he begged, “don't—don't try to talk me out of it. I've already made up my mind. I'm fucking eighteen and there's still so much about myself and my kind that I don't even know. I want to know what I am, Lance. I want to know _who_ I am. I want to know where I came from. I want to meet mer who light up like me and have the same fins I do, and who—who knew my mom,” he stammered. “I know I'm never gonna see her again,” he said, “but this is the next best thing.”

“I would never try to talk you out of this,” Lance mumbled defensively, fighting against the wetness pooling in the corners of his eyes. “You know that.”

“You know I don’t want to leave,” Keith said eventually, his voice more even than before. “But I think we both know this is something I have to do.

For a moment Lance was quiet. He wondered if Keith had given any kind of tactical thought to this beyond the fact that he was gonna do it. Was he even prepared for a journey that long and arduous and lonely? “It's a long swim, Keith,” he said. “Way longer than here to Portland.” (Which was the farthest away Keith had ever swam since settling in Santa Cruz, and that was a month-long trip. It was the longest month of Lance's life).

“I know. I'm ready.”

Lance sized him up, wondering if maybe _this_ was what he'd been preparing for all year instead of trying to shift. The idea was a bitter taste in his mouth.

“That's like... months, though,” Lance protested. “Maybe even a whole year.”

“I know. But you're starting college in just a few months anyway,” Keith rationalized. “You're gonna be so busy, especially with that internship, and I’ll be a distraction to you anyway.”

“Keith.”

“It's the perfect time to do this,” Keith insisted. “Please, Lance, let me do this?”

And Lance understood then what he was really asking. He didn't need Lance's permission to do anything, of course, but he couldn't leave thinking he'd broken Lance's heart.

Alright, then.

Time to put his brave face on.

“It's not forever,” Keith repeated, softly, almost as if he was assuring himself as much as he was Lance. “I'll come back. I just.. I have to know.”

“Okay.”

Keith blinked at him in disbelief. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Lance said, painting a smile on with long-honed skill, and crawled across the map and into Keith's personal bubble, wrapping him up in his arms. With a heaving sigh Keith relaxed into his embrace, finally dropping that old bottle to curl his arms around Lance's waist.

“I'm going tomorrow,” Keith said into his neck, and made no comment when the strength of Lance's grip doubled. “I thought, the sooner the better, before I have time to second-guess it.”

“Okay,” Lance breathed, and despite the fact that he'd already given in and given up, he found himself casting one last shot in the dark, hoping it would land, hoping it would hook him. His Hail Mary. “Okay, well if you're leaving, you're gonna meet my family first.”

Keith stiffened. “Lance,” he began, doubt coloring his tone, but Lance doubled down.

“I’ll bring them down to say hi, and then when you leave tomorrow we can take the family boat out and see you off. Please, Keith?”

“Alright,” he relented. “Fine. But if anyone screams this time, I'm gonna go full siren and drag them under for laughs.”

Lance giggled. “Noted.”

  


 

**. . .**

 

  


When Marco and Jess finally arrived after Lance’s cryptic 'please come over for an important family announcement’ phone call, Lance gathered them all in the living room, sat them down, and tittered in the center of the room on the other side of the coffee table, wilting under their gaze for a long, pregnant minute before coming out with it.

“So… I have a secret boyfriend,” he said, tapping his fingers together under his chin.

“Yeah,” Marco snorted. “We all guessed that like a year ago, did you really need the dramatics to announce it? Ow,” he complained when Laura smacked him on the back of the head from her seat on the arm of the couch.

“Let him talk,” she hissed.

“That’s not the announcement, though,” Lance said, and reached into his pocket for the polaroid picture he’d tucked there earlier. It was one of the ones he’d taken at the Natural Bridges Butterfly Preserve last summer, one where you could see Keith’s tail and fins in all their glory. He kept it to himself for a moment, admiring Keith’s stark silhouette against the rock and leaves and sky, fondly remembering his enamorment with the butterflies. Then, he passed the photo to Laura.

For a minute Laura just stared. Everyone else got curious and impatient enough that they began crowding around her to get a look for themselves at Lance’s secret boyfriend, and then Laura was lowering the picture to her lap, her eyebrows raised so far that Lance could barely see them behind her bangs. “This is a weird prank,” she said, “even for you.”

Lance laughed, scratching at his cheek. “Not a prank,” he assured her, “which I know you guys won’t believe till you see him, so I figured we could just skip me convincing you that this is real, and just… jump straight to me introducing you to him. He lives in a grotto right below our neighborhood,” Lance said, pointing a thumb at the front door. “We’ve been best friends since we were ten, and he’s leaving on a _really_ long trip tomorrow, and I don’t exactly know when he’s gonna be back, so I just.. I want you guys to meet him before he goes away.”

Everyone gaped at him, casting sideways glances at each other and down at the photo until Lance huffed and snatched the photo back.

“Alright, anyone who wants to meet a merman who is also my best friend and boyfriend, follow me. But put on close-toed shoes,” he threw over his shoulder, “because it’s a _bit_ of a climb.”

That was how Lance found himself inside the grotto with his entire family, watching Keith introduce himself to each and every one of them with that awkward nature he had, unsure what to do with their awe of his existence, trying to make a good impression but not knowing how. Still, he noticed how Keith’s handshakes didn’t linger, and he tried not to give any one person his attention for too long. Like he was afraid of growing too attached to any of them, so he combated it by continuously redirecting his attention, cutting away the spider strings his family was attempting to weave in his path, making sure a web could never form. Like maybe he knew that there was a Keith-shaped hole in this family and that if he strayed too close to it he would fall in, never again to reemerge. And Lance knew then that his Hail Mary had never once stood a chance.

Keith had already made up his mind about all of this, and it didn't happen today. It didn't happen last summer. It happened years ago. A lifetime ago.

The simple truth was that Keith didn't want a family handed to him on a silver platter. He wanted to find his own, and Lance respected that.

  


 

**. . .**

  


 

The next morning Lance awoke alone on their pile of blankets in the corner of the grotto, reaching out for Keith with groggy, sleep-heavy eyes, and finding only cold, damp blanket. Keith never slept out of the water—his fins and gills would dry out. No matter how many times Lance slept over inside the grotto, Keith always ended up slipping back into the lake sometime during the night. Maybe it was his relentless selfishness acting up again, but he’d been hoping to wake up next to Keith this morning. Just once, before he left. Just once.

“Mornin’,” Keith hummed from the lake as Lance sat up and stretched, peering at Lance over his folded forearms.

“Mornin,’” Lance hummed back. It was almost like today was any other Sunday, if he didn’t think too hard.

But it wasn’t, of course, and an hour later Lance was already half-a-mile out to sea, standing at the rail of the family boat and letting the bitter cold bite of the seaspray serve as his morning coffee, unwarmed as of yet by the rising sun. The morning fog was light today, and glowed behind them, giving away the sun’s position even though it wasn’t quite visible, and by the time they were a mile out, Santa Cruz had vanished beyond the fog. They might as well be out in the middle of the Pacific for all they could see of the shoreline.

“Are you sure he's following us?” Papá asked, craning his head out of the window of the room where he was steering the ship.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Lance called back, and then leaned toward Beni and Gabi where they were clinging to the rail next to him, and pointed at the waves, below waiting for one to crest and flow before speaking. “See those bubbles?” he asked. “That red reflection? That's him.”

“Gay,” Beni whispered, and Lance threatened to throw him to the sharks.

When they got about two miles out from shore, Keith began to show off. It caught Lance entirely off-guard the first time, but pretty soon he was leaning over the rail and shouting scores between one and ten as Keith breached and leaped and splashed like some kind of teenage bay dolphin. Gabi and Beni cheered at every spray of water and flash of white fins, and even Marco came over to the railing, as captivated with Keith’s rambunctious display as the kids were. But Lance was more captivated than anyone. He’d never in his _life_ seen Keith act this way. Despite the black hole metastasizing in the pit of his stomach, growing denser and heavier with every inch further they sailed out to sea, he had to laugh at Keith’s total transparency.

“He's a real charmer huh?” Laura prodded, nudging Lance in the ribs with her elbow. They hadn’t had a moment to talk one on one just the two of them since he dropped this on his family last night, but he was sure he was going to get a mouthful from her about it eventually.

“Not really,” Lance laughed, and then sighed wistfully, rolling his eyes as Keith breached backward, exiting the water entirely for a solid second before plunging into an oncoming wave, his overloaded satchel falling off his shoulder entirely so that he had to scramble back for it after emerging from the wave again. “He just wants you guys to like him.”

That, or he was just overcome with joy at the approaching journey.

“You really want us to like him too, huh.”

“Yeah,” Lance sighed.

“You are _crazy_ , Lance. You know that right?”

“Oh, I know.”

“We just passed the point we agreed on,” his mom said softly a few moments later, having come over to them without Lance realizing. Lance's heart sank along with her words. They’d stood around the map as a family together this morning and marked the spot where they would stop and turn the boat around, just under six miles out from shore, where the depth of the sea began to abruptly plummet, marking the true beginning of the open ocean. The drop-off.

This was it, then. The goodbye point.

Keith surfaced some hundred yards away as the boat slowed to a stop to look back at them, and then disappeared again to resurface beside the boat a few seconds later, gazing up at them all in earnest.

“Everyone say goodbye to Keith!” Mamá said, and Lacoste-McClains called out their heartfelt farewells to the boy they’d only just met last night. Keith waved back at them, awkwardly smiling before Lance's mom ushered Gabi and Beni away, eyeing Lance knowingly as they went and beckoning Laura and Marco to follow her.

 _Thanks_ , Lance mouthed. “I'll be right back,” he announced aloud.

Laura shrieked, _“Oi, what are you doing?!”_ as Lance vaulted the railing and dove the short distance into the rolling sea.

“Give them a minute alone,” he could hear his mom saying over Laura's continued cursing as he surfaced, grasping at the embedded ladder on the boat’s side for purchase so he didn't have to keep treading water. Not a second later, Keith surfaced, inches away from his face and pressing in closer all the while. Lance’s breath caught in his throat for about forty different reasons.

“I know what you're doing,” Keith told him softly, “introducing your family out of nowhere like this.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Lance lied, looking away even as Keith wrapped his hands around his waist, but his eyes landed on the boat’s anchor where it was secured to the side of the boat, rusted on the topside and dotted with barnacles on the underside, and the knot in his throat threatened to unravel.

“Lance.”

“Hey,” he joked, as lightly as he could, “eight anchors are better than one right?”

“Lance,” Keith pressed, ignoring Lance’s offhand tone in favor of something heavier and far more serious. He took Lance’s face in hand, then, forcing him to meet his eyes. They shone violet-brown in the sunlight, as always, as always, and Lance fought the urge to memorize every speck of coloration. Those eyes searched his face, softening at whatever they saw there. “I only need one reason to come back, stupid, and I already have it.”

Lance's jaw dropped. Keith kissed him then anyway, which made for the messiest kiss ever. The back of Lance’s head pressed hard into the ladder rung and the waves washed up with relentless fervor between them, pushing, pulling, driving them apart and then back together, sometimes working against them, sometimes working in their favor. For a brief minute of bliss, the world was all sea salt and sunshine. Did Keith taste like the ocean, or did the ocean taste like Keith? Now _there_ was a question for the ages.

They lingered in each other’s orbits for a small eternity, drawing it out, neither wanting to be the first to pull away. When the motion of Keith’s lips against his began to slow Lance felt his heart cracking, one new hairline fracture for every microscopic molecule of air that came between them. He didn’t know how to stop, so he just kept sealing the fractures, until finally one was too big. The fracture became a break, and Keith pulled away. The ocean breeze was frigid in his absence, and Lance found himself leaning forward, dignity-be-damned, chasing after the kiss even though he knew it was over.

He pressed his lips hard to Keith’s, one last chaste kiss, and then let go. Both of Keith’s hands moved to his cheeks as Lance pulled away this time, keeping his head from drooping forward like it wanted to do.

With painstaking agony, Lance forced his eyes open again.

A thousand emotions fought for control of Keith’s face, and given a thousand years maybe Lance could have parsed them. Given a thousand years, maybe he would have enough time to tell Keith all the things he wanted to tell him, to do all the things he wanted to do with him, to love him in all the ways he deserved to be loved. But he didn’t. He didn’t even have a thousand seconds left. He had a hundred, if that, and he had to spend them wisely. So he moved his hands from where they were latched around Keith’s back underwater, bringing them to his neck just under his jaw, and touched their foreheads together. And he’d probably said this a thousand times before, but he would say it once more, in the hopes that he could say it a thousand more times when Keith came home, and that someday, on some bright and sunny street with the wind in his hair, Keith would _feel_ at home enough to say it back.

“I love you,” he intoned, as much a plea as it was a fact, and something in Keith’s eyes broke.

He bit his lip hard and slumped into Lance, succumbing to the force of a wave. “I— Lance,” he whined, “fuck, _fuck_ , I want to say it,” he spilled all at once, “I always have, I feel the same, Lance, I do, with my whole fucking heart, every second of every day, and I want to tell you. I want to say it, but I _can’t_. Not— not yet. I’m sorry, Lance, I’m so sorry..”

“Hey,” Lance soothed, shocked and confused at the outburst, tightening his hold on Keith’s waist. “Hey, it’s okay. I know.”

“You deserve to hear it,” Keith insisted, broken, “I just... I’m afraid. If I said it, I think that I would...” He took a long shuddering breath, gathering himself. “I’m afraid that if I say it, I’ll shift,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

The words settled on Lance slowly, slotting into place. They were contradictory to everything he knew, and yet, they made so much sense. Keith _wanted_ to shift, so why would he avoid doing the one thing he was absolutely certain would trigger it? The answer was simple of course. Keith wanted two things simultaneously that could never coexist; he couldn’t have them both, and he’d been trying to convince himself he could for so long that he’d almost come to believe it until Lance dug up that knife. He’d lived in cognitive dissonance for so long that it had become his reality.

This—leaving home—was the only way. Lance recognized that in this moment more clearly than he ever had before, and it was what gave him the strength to pull back another few inches from Keith, far enough so they could see each other as a whole, again.

“It’s okay,” Lance told him. “You don’t have to say it, Keith, I already know.”

Tangible relief crashed over Keith’s face, fighting away the tears in his eyes and helping the fire return, the anticipation of the fast-approaching adventure causing his hidden freckles to spark, and his fins to flash with a kaleidoscope of color. The thrill of the looming unknown. The even greater thrill of inevitable discovery.

“Come back to me okay?”

And Keith said, his face all alight, “I will.”

_I will._

Those were the last words Keith said to him before they parted ways, and Lance would hold them closer to his chest than anything else on the long days and nights he would spend alone, whether he realized it yet or not. But for now, he’d let them dangle. Let them hover in the air, like a tangible thing, like one of the many seabirds circling above their boat, bringing him comfort that Keith would come back to him. Because Lance had given a lot of things to Keith over the years—time, money, places, things, even people—but those were all things Lance could live without, or things he could get back, or find again if for some reason fate decided that he and Keith were never to meet again.

There was one thing he’d given to Keith that he'd never get back, though.

When the next wave welled up between them, Keith let it push them apart. Used it to drift a few feet backward, away from Lance, and the boat. His hair pooled on the surface above his shoulders, rippling like seaweed, and his eyes were dark. No unnatural deep sea light-effects. Just Keith and his violet-brown eyes.

Lance blinked, and he was gone.


	7. Open Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **PLEASE NOTE the changing of the rating on this story to M**
> 
> Thanks so much for hanging around and waiting for this. Love u. Special thanks to Ran and Brigid and Froggy for betaing this for me and/or offering much-needed and helpful advice!! Love you babes! More special thanks to everyone that has listened to me rant about this chapter (Angie and Sarah lol).
> 
> I've never been so nervous posting a chapter just because of the content here so pls accept this humble offering and know it comes from the deepest wells of my heart.
> 
> EDIT: OMG I ALMOST FORGOT, TWO PPL DREW ART FOR THIS FIC
> 
> THANK YOU FOR THIS BLESSED ART
> 
> https://twitter.com/shannterelle/status/1138123285806354432?s=20
> 
> https://twitter.com/thedrawingjay/status/1125009587072065538?s=20

_We’re in the dog days now, Leandro_.

That’s what Papá always said when July rolled around. When the days were the longest and the light didn’t fully leave the sky until 10pm.

Those summer days were long and endless, which vacillated between blessing or curse depending on where Lance ended up that day. If it was a day that he got to spend with Hunk and Pidge on the Boardwalk, or whiling away the hours with Keith by messing around out in the harbor, or hiking in the woods with his family to the hidden creeks to dip their toes in for hours, then it was a blessing. But it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes, like that one summer when he was thirteen, the family van got a flat tire at high noon, eighty miles east of the city in the grasslands where there wasn’t any shade, and Lance resorted to laying under the car while Marco and Papá toiled uselessly over the engine and Mamá argued on the phone with the tow truck over how many miles away they were. Summer days were always the longest when all Lance wanted was for them to end. _Please,_ he thought, laying under that car with a dry tongue and dirt in his hair, _please, just let this day end._

Those, Lance thought, were the dog days.

The dog days came early this year. In April, to be exact, settling on the land as Lance watched Keith’s white-and-red tailfin flick through a wave and vanish for the last time.

The first morning after Keith’s departure, Lance found himself down in the grotto even though there was no reason for him to come here now. Not with Keith gone. It would be months and months before he returned, and even that was a conservative estimate. This journey of Keith’s, to find his family in the distant reaches of the southern hemisphere and come all the way back again, would most likely take an entire year. He knew that. He’d accepted it. A part of him had accepted it years ago. But… another part of him was still hoping Keith had changed his mind about the whole thing, and that’s why he dragged himself down here to the grotto at first light before the sun had even risen over the mountains.

Stupid. The grotto was empty, of course.

The cold echoes of his own footsteps mocked him, so different from the soft wet splashes that usually betrayed Keith’s presence in the cave, and which were so glaringly absent now. Keith never changed his mind once he'd made it up to do something.

Still, Lance came back to the grotto every day for the whole summer.

Just to check in.

Just in case.

Summer solstice passed, every sunrise in tandem with the constellation Canis Major and the star Sirius, which according to Matt was sometimes called the Dog Star and thus spawned the whole ‘dog days of summer’ saying. Huh. You learn something new every day. Even as the Earth began to tilt back on its axis and the days began to shorten again by the smallest of increments, for Lance, they felt longer than ever.

But as heavy as his heart was in Keith’s ever-lengthening absence, the only thing he could do was keep going. He had a life to live, after all.

“Heya buddy,” Hunk said as Lance opened the door to their new house.

It was a tiny and unassuming place that they’d rented, nestled on a hilltop just a little farther from the beach than he would’ve liked, but closer to the college campus. There were unchecked wildflowers blooming out front and neighbors squeezed in close on both sides, and the exterior lavender wood paneling looked like it had seen better days and better paint jobs too. If you slid your hand on the rail that lined the steps out front it would come away with splinters (he learned this the hard way and had to pick six or seven of them out on their first trip with boxes), so they quickly learned not to do that. The house had two little bedrooms and a narrow, cramped kitchen to the right, barely big enough for a small round breakfast table at one end, and a living room to the left, so small there was only room for a few pieces of furniture, which were all piled haphazardly in the center of the room right now because they couldn’t quite figure out where to fit everything yet with their brains all fried from the summer sun and the broken A/C. This place was cheap and falling apart despite the steep rental price, and yet, Lance loved it desperately.

He tossed his keys onto the table amongst the clutter and cardboard boxes. He was on his last trip of stuff right now, and once he finished bringing his bags of clothes in from the car, he was officially moved out. Or, in. Depending on how you looked at it.

“Hey,” he called back. Pidge and Hunk were chilling in a pile on the couch together, their limbs all tangled since they were both squeezed in the middle of the couch between precariously stacked boxes, the couch itself not even pushed against a wall yet and half-obscured by a stray empty bookshelf. He rolled his eyes at the sight of them. “Lazy,” he accused, but he knew they must be as tired as he was, having done the entire move in one day.

“C’mere,” Pidge cajoled. “Be lazy with us.”

“Embrace the lazy,” Hunk agreed, reaching out for his water bottle but knocking it off the coffee table on accident instead.

So Lance laughed, and skipped over, and picked up Hunk’s water before launching himself onto the pile of bodies.

“Ow,” Pidge complained from underneath him, “ _geddoff,_  you’re bony and fat—”

“How can I be bony _and_ fat,” Lance laughed, “you have to pick one.”

“No,” Pidge said, and Lance feigned offense, going full dramatics and draping himself limp across them both.

“This is the worst birthday ever,” he sighed. “The love of my life is away on a soul-searching journey across the globe while I’m stuck in dumb stupid Santa Cruz, I spent the whole day lifting boxes and stubbing my toes on furniture, and now Pidge is calling me names.”

“Would it be better if we gave you your present now rather than later? Ow,” Hunk complained when Pidge kicked him.

“Present?” Lance perked up. “But... but you both already gave me something.” His eyebrows drew together in confusion; the two of them had surprised Lance by pooling together and paying his portion of their first month’s rent, which was a huge deal and _might_ have made him cry. Just a little. “Please tell me you didn’t spend anything else, guys, because that was already—”

“This one didn’t cost all that much, we just pilfered supplies from the garage. Yeah, go ahead and show him, I guess, Hunk. I just thought we should wait till tomorrow…”

Hunk wiggled his phone out of his pocket from underneath Lance, then began to flick through it. Then, Hunk turned the phone around to show him a picture. It was a picture of a camera, actually, attached to some kind of exterior battery or device, with a sign propped up next to it that said ‘ _Smile for the camera, Keith!’_

“What…”

“We just thought.. it might help ease your mind,” Pidge explained haltingly. “And it’d make it so you didn’t actually have to go down there every day to check for yourself, you know? The camera takes a pic once an hour and sends it to a Dropbox folder. Or he can take one himself. I _know_ he loves cameras and knows how to use one. So as long as you check up on the Dropbox, you’ll know right away when he’s back.”

“Right,” Lance said, willing himself not to get choked up as he looked away from the static image of the grotto. In a way, this was the nicest thing Hunk and Pidge could have possibly done for him since he was starting both his internship and college next week, and there was no way he’d have time to go all the way home and down to the grotto every day. But at the same time, this gift deeply saddened him. In one fell swoop, it took away the only excuse he had to visit the place where he felt closest to Keith, and he was terrified that with this shortcut available, he would slow in his visits and eventually stop going altogether. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

“You don’t have to say anything at all,” Hunk said, and pulled Lance down into a more secure hug. “We love you buddy, and we’re here for you. Don’t ever forget that, okay?”

“Yeah yeah, I won’t. Sap.”

The room fell quiet, save for the sound of their tired breathing and the guttural hum of the iffy A/C. Yeah, this room was currently a disaster, but there was a certain ring of harmony to the chaos. Having all their stuff here, it felt like a home, even though all the pieces weren’t quite in the right place yet. As his eyes roamed over the empty shelf, the cluttered dining table, and the lazily taped boxes, he noticed that Hunk and Pidge had already started unwrapping his seashells for him. They were sitting on the dining table behind the textbooks he’d just finished buying yesterday, the pile of wrinkly newspaper spilling off behind them onto the tile. It reminded him irrevocably of the first time he did this, long ago. (Ten years old and making his first shopping list, eleven years old and lowering cinder blocks by rope at 1am down a cliffside so Keith would have a shelf to put his stuff on, twelve years old and flopping down with Keith onto their new bean bag chair together for the first time.) And he thought, _okay._

_Okay, yeah._

_I can do this again._

 

**. . .**

 

It was with adrenaline buzzing in his veins that Lance sat in his car in the SLRC parking lot, two weeks into August. Three cups of coffee were not enough, although Rhonda had taken away his last one before he’d even finished it and dragged him out of the booth by the bicep, insisting that he’d had enough like he was some kind of caffeine junkie, already pushing him toward the front door before he’d even had time to protest. _You’re gonna do amazing, sweetie,_ she’d insisted, just like everyone else in his life. But Rhonnie was the last one he’d spoken to, so it was her bright southern accent he heard echoing in his head as he emerged from his car into the sunlight and nervously approached the main entrance of the building.

The lobby was small and cozy; clinical and clean. Framed pictures of dolphins and seals lined the walls, and the front desk was stocked with brochures, business cards, and a deflated crab plushie. The floor was freshly-waxed and slippery and Lance tried not to stare at his upside-down reflection.

“Hi,” the woman behind the desk called out. “New intern? McClain?”

“Yeah,” Lance smiled, deciding not to correct her on the last name, “that’s me.”

“Great. Everyone else is here already; you can take the left hallway over there, and then when it forks off, turn left again. Room 133.”

“Oh,” Lance said, taken aback by that. He was the last one here? But.. but he was twenty minutes early. Right?

“Sign in,” she directed, sliding a clipboard toward him across the counter, “and take this with you.”

Lance signed in as fast as physically possible, then accepted the ID badge connected to a cheap SLRC lanyard. His own face smiled back at him from the grainy, printed image, next to the words _Intern - McClain_ and a long identification number. He tried not to frown at it. He’d applied under the name Lacoste-McClain. He was sure of it.

“Better hurry,” the girl nudged. “They’ll be waiting.”

“Right,” he said, “thanks,” and left the _‘reason for visiting’_ section of the sign-in sheet blank.

The halls were sparse. It wasn’t like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which was alive with color at every turn, every square inch of walking space crowded with locals and tourists and employees. This was a rehabilitation facility only, and while they had tours sometimes, they were purely educational—mostly reserved for schools on field trips. Maybe he’d get to help out on some of those kinds of tours? That would be amazing. The thought of teaching kids about sea stuff and getting them as excited about it all as he’d been at that age had him feeling giddy and lightheaded. Right now the halls were mostly empty though, save for a few people in clothing ranging from lab coats to patchy jeans, none of which spared him much notice as he made his way through, counting the room numbers. As he went, he tried to steal glances into the rooms through cracked doorways but saw next to nothing. Until he got to the first fork that the woman at the desk had spoken of. Crystal blue light sparkled down from the end of the corridor leading right, while the corridor on the left was lined with cold fluorescent lights and nondescript white doors. Unable to stop himself, even knowing he was already the last to arrive, he let curiosity get the better of him and he took the right fork.

The hallway curved and he met no one as he followed it, peering into each door as he passed. These ones had windows and were full of life. One had a pool in the center over which a girl in khakis was crouching and feeding a sea turtle, another one was empty of people and full of dry fish tanks, another one housed people in full lab coat regalia poring over a table covered in papers and microscopes and water-filled tubs. So intently was he watching this window that he didn’t even notice he was no longer alone in the hallway until it was too late. He ran smack into a person walking the opposite direction, causing them to slosh the bucket full of dead fish he was holding all over the waxy tile floor.

 _“Dude,”_ the guy complained, “my shoes!”

“Sorry!” Lance blurted, _shit,_ “I—”

“Good going, Griffin,” someone else laughed, emerging from the final set of double doors at the end of the hallway. Lance had almost made it there, and the brilliant blue light of the pool beyond flickered as the door swung, the sound of seals barking teasing Lance with their proximity. The other man approached as ‘Griffin’ grumbled under his breath, and Lance swallowed as he read his ID. _Director - Iverson._ Oh no.

“New intern?” Iverson asked, coming to a stop by the two boys and raising his eyebrows at Lance’s own ID badge. “You’re goin’ the wrong way, cadet. Orientation is that-a-way.”

“Oh,” Lance said, playing along, “my bad. I’ll head over there now. Uh—nice to meet you, sir,” he tacked on, reaching out to shake the director’s hand.

Griffin rolled his eyes, still grumbling, and Iverson released Lance’s hand. “Better go get a mop,” he told Griffin, and Lance had to bite back a laugh at the look of pure exhaustion and rage on Griffin’s face.

“Yeah, laugh it up,” Griffin said as Iverson left them. “This’ll be you in a few short years. Hope you like mopping up dead fish water, because that’s all this job is at the end of the day.”

“What?” The word fell out of Lance’s mouth, clipped and short due to the shock of hearing such a sentiment in such a place. It was jarring; unnatural. Wrong. “No, it’s not,” he said, doubling down despite the fact that he knew he should be making nice with this guy if he wanted to fit in and do well and get hired on for real next summer.

Griffin rolled his eyes, still kicking water off his shoes.

“It’s not,” Lance insisted, because it _wasn’t._  “This place—it’s the most important building in Santa Cruz,” he insisted. “Last year alone you guys released over five dozen rehabilitated animals back into the wild. You saved a beached whale just last semester. The offshore research team is working on things nobody else on the entire coast is paying attention to. This job is _way_ more than cleaning up fish water, it’s about saving the ocean, and I don’t know why you’d even work here if you didn’t believe that.”

This Griffin guy was staring at him now, his stupid flippy surfer bangs hanging in his eyes, his lip twitching in amusement as though this whole interaction was cosmically funny somehow. “Oh,” he said. “You’re one of those.”

Lance frowned. “One of what?”

Griffin opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment a chattering of voices entered the hallway, followed quickly by a tour group. Lance peered around Griffin to look at them as they came. The SLRC employee who led them was walking backward, her short blonde hair bouncing as she walked and explained to the kids where they were going and what they’d see there. The kids followed eagerly—no older than nine or ten—all carrying brochures from the front lobby and looking around at the hall with bright eyes and open mouths.

“One of those,” Griffin emphasized, gesturing with a nod at the departing group as they passed through the double doors to the outdoor pool. Before Lance could snap back at this know-it-all jerk for calling him a child, Griffin extended one hand, his disaffected sass softening into something more kind and welcoming. “James,” he said, grasping Lance’s hand firmly when he reluctantly accepted the offer to shake hands. “Look, new guy.” He smiled ruefully. “This place does good things, yeah, but we’re not saving the ocean here. The sooner you get that, the better a time you’ll have.”

With that, he winked, picked the fish-bucket up, and left.

Lance was left gaping after him, alone at the end of the hallway, weightless and untethered in the dancing lattice of aqua light cast across the hall from the windows of the double doors, the sparkling refracted surface of the water outside. A strange and unwelcome emotion seeped into his chest as he glanced back over his shoulder at those double doors one more time before leaving their sunny windows behind and backtracking deeper into the facility. This time he took the correct fork, down a sterile white hall, and tried to put James’s words out of mind as he took his seat at a table in a sterile white room with all the other new interns to fill out sterile white paperwork.

He was never really able to, though.

College was exciting, and declaring a major when there were so many different subfields he could choose was hard as hell, so he decided to go in undeclared at first and just take every class under the sun. He cheerfully overdosed on credits and loved every second of it. The course load offered a decent distraction to keep his mind off Keith, too, but... not by a lot. The ocean and its many sub-branches was his choice of study, after all, so missing Keith was never too far from his mind, even at its farthest.

He had a routine going now.

Obviously it differed from week to week depending on whether or not he had exams, but essentially he would wake up and pick one: Work Day, School Day, or (most common) Both Day. The daily routine for a Both Day looked something like this, give or take:

_ > Wake up. _

_ > Remember with a jolt that Keith is gone. _

_ > Reach instinctively for the laptop where it rests on the empty side of the bed from when you passed out at 3am doing homework, and check the Dropbox to see if Keith stopped by the grotto anytime in the last twenty-four hours. _

_ > Take a minute to accept that he didn’t. It’s too soon, anyway. You don’t know why you check so obsessively when it’s still too soon for him to be back. _

_ > Eat breakfast and get on with your life. _

_ > Go to class. Drink coffee and think about how tired you are. Do homework for your next class while trying to listen to this class. _

_ > Go to class. Flip through the slides you missed in the last class while trying to take notes on this class too. _

_ > Go to class. This one straight up sucks (who the hell cares about math) but whatever you do, do not skip this class or else you’ll have no idea what the hell is going on! _

_ > Maybe skip this one _ _class…. They’re talking about bioluminescence this week and you’re only so strong, you know? Maybe just this once. You’ll make up for it later._

_ > Make up for it by frantically studying things they aren’t even talking about in class yet to deal with the crushing guilt of ditching. _

_ > Go to work. _

_ > Take a deep breath as you spend the first two hours of your shift filing paperwork from the day before, and remember why you’re doing all of this in the first place. Remind yourself it’s all worth it, in the end, even if it’s not exactly what you expected it would be. You’re doing this because you believe in something. _

_ > It works. You feel a bit of zen coming on as you make the rounds with the animals staying at the SLRC. _

_ > Realize as a high school field trip comes in that you missed Benito’s soccer game on accident yesterday, and spend the rest of the evening distracted from your work, wondering how you could have possibly forgotten that. _

_ > Linger after hours, off the clock, and pet Sarahi the baby hammerhead shark when there’s nobody there to reprimand you for sticking your hand in her tank, because you are overdosing on pent-up, unreleased affection. You only see the family like only once a week nowadays, if you’re lucky. You don’t see Hunk and Pidge as much as you thought you would either when you started living together, because you’re all so busy now. You miss Keith. You wonder if it’s possible to die of touch starvation. Sarahi doesn’t mind the attention, anyway. You’re pretty sure she only puts up with it because you bring her food five times a week, but you’re okay with that. It’s the easiest relationship you have going for you, right now. _

_ > Shit, you forgot to eat lunch again. Eat a big dinner to make up for it. _

_ > Do homework in bed until you pass out around 3am mid-essay. _

Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

Winter descended on the city like a fog and Lance bought Keith a Christmas present even though he was still gone, hoping he'd be home soon to open it. The pocket knife he’d picked out had an opal bird etched into the side, and it kinda matched the one Keith had hand-carved for him back in middle school, which he still carried around with him everywhere he went. Lance wrapped the knife, and Christmas came and went, and it ended up in the bottom drawer of his dresser, tucked between that old jar of shark teeth and his walkie talkie.

It was easier if he didn’t have to look at these things every day.

There were already enough daily reminders of Keith’s absence as it was, like the hundreds of seashells collected on shelves around the house, three-fourths of which were gifted by Keith. That angler fish skeleton which was now hanging from a mount in the upper left corner of their living room (they liked to try and shoot nerf bullets through the jaw). Every moment he spent pouring over textbooks, reading dense articles about the ocean, every small decision he made course-wise that affected which career path he might take. Every moment he spent inside the SLRC trying to work his way up the ladder from the menial paperwork and feeding rotations, trying to convince them that he _knew_ the ocean and not just from textbooks, and that he needed to be doing more than just feeding the sea turtles three evenings a week and making sure Sarahi was taking her medicine on Saturdays. Trying to explain why he should be allowed to help in the lab even though he wasn’t technically qualified yet and why he knew exactly where the rehab seals would go when they were first released and why he was the perfect candidate to replace Nadia on the school field trip tours when she left next year, without telling them _why_ he knew these things. Without telling the whole story. Without Keith. He’d always catch his tongue before spilling something like: _I know it’s not on the map but it’s true, I know because Keith told me_. Iverson would just smile through Lance’s weekly plea, and ruffle his hair like he was just some kid on a field trip, and Lance would be left feeling like the same five year old telling his parents how he was gonna save the ocean.

That, and the Dropbox.

As of the beginning of his second semester of college, they had changed the battery on the wifi grotto camera several times, and there were now a grand total of 1989 pictures that had been automatically sent to the Dropbox. All the same. Different lighting depending on the time of day, and sometimes with the occasional guest appearances from Lance, Hunk, Pidge, and random members of Lance’s family, but in the end, they were all the same. All empty of Keith.

On Valentine's Day he reopened the present he’d gotten for Keith for Christmas and cried. Then he wrapped it again and put the stupid velvet black box he’d bought that morning in the bottom of the drawer with it.

Dumb. Stupid. It was stupid; he _knew_ that. Premeditated stupidity, born of an ache in his chest that radiated all the way from here to the sun and back again. But investing money in a future he wanted desperately felt better than sitting around doing nothing, especially when all his other investments were (so far) falling short and ringing hollow. The engagement ring had cost him a whole month’s rent, but Pidge and Hunk were cool about it.

By the time summer came he had finally paid them back, and the velvet black box was covered with dust.

“He should be back by now,” Lance said. His hands and knees were still coated in dirt from the climb back up from the grotto.

Laura was digging dirt from underneath her fingernails and offered no response as she leaned on the old wooden fence by the cliffside and stared off in the direction of the midday sea, hair blowing loose across her cheeks. He was grateful she was here. He hated going down to the grotto alone, these days, but somebody had to change the battery on the camera. It was a nice day. All the birds were out singing and soaking up the sun, and yet Lance felt cold. The arctic trio had already come and gone this year and he hated the way they had looked at him, the way they seemed unsurprised that a year had passed by without bringing Keith home, the way that the grotto had seemed even emptier than usual after their visit.

“What if something happened to him?” Lance worried, finally putting words to the thought that had plagued him for months now. “I feel like I should be out _looking_ for him.”

“We're talking about the same Keith that barked down a killer whale, right?” Laura wondered mildly, leaning over the driftwood fence into Lance’s field of view, cutting his sight off from the sea with a wall of curly brown hair. “And fought a shark over fish scraps when he was ten?”

Lance laughed, turning away so that he could lean against the fence too, facing their house across the street. Mamá was out in her overalls watering the garden. It was calming to watch. “Yeah. You're right,” he relented. It was easier to just agree rather than to push the issue, to dig any further into the fear. Easier to believe Keith was right on the horizon. Almost home.

“He's fine,” Laura assured him. “He's just taking his time finding himself. We’re all out here doing that, you know?” And Lance had to agree with her too. That was the college experience, right? Staying up till 4am in his starter-house with Hunk and Pidge watching horror movies, tasting beer for the first time, learning when to pull all-nighters and when to just say fuck-it and bullshit your way through the exam... “It’s just,” Laura sighed, “Keith is doing it somewhere where he can’t call home and let you know he’s running late.”

“I know,” Lance breathed, blinking back tears and waving at Mamá, who had set down her watering can now and was attempting to shout over the traffic to call them inside for dinner. As Laura pushed off the fence and skipped through a flower patch toward the road, Lance thought about explaining to her that knowing didn’t make this any less hard. He thought about venting to her properly, over some tea maybe, in the family booth at the Luna Café.

But then she turned back to him when he didn’t immediately follow her, and her eyes softened, and he realized the face he was making right now must have betrayed a little too much. So he yanked back violently and reeled it all in, schooling his expression into something neutral just in time for her to ask, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.”

He kinda was.

He’d be alright. Really. They were just in overtime, right now. Keith was overdue, and all that meant was that every second that ticked by brought him one inch closer to home. He was almost here.

That belief carried him through the summer and a long sophomore year filled with actual overtime at the SLRC and three changes of his major, from marine biology to oceanology to environmental science, and an increasingly strained relationship with both his academic advisor and the director of the SLRC. By the time spring break came around, he was beginning to feel like he might go back to majoring in marine biology again next year, and that thought was infinitely tiring.

When the three arctic mer came in late March on their yearly visit, Keith had still not returned, and they were sorrowful but unsurprised.

“He may have chosen to stay,” Allura said softly, “or... perhaps, to become a bird like his mother.”

“He's coming back,” Lance insisted. “He promised. You didn't see him at all on your trip?”

“We did not,” Romelle apologized. “The ocean is a vast place. I’m sorry, Lance.”

“I know. It's okay,” he lied.

 

**. . .**

 

When autumn arrived without Keith for the third time since he’d left, Lance's studies began to seriously suffer.

He'd been surviving thus far on a separation between his personal life and his career. Compartmentalization, as it were. But it started to bleed over as he began his junior year of college without Keith. Every lesson, every mention of the sea, it was just a mantra of _Keith Keith Keith_ ringing in his ears. On Keith's birthday, October 23rd, Lance ignored the slew of pity texts from Hunk and Pidge asking if he wanted to hang out tonight (they knew it was Keith’s birthday, of course, and he really didn’t want to be anybody’s pity-case today), skipped class entirely, and when the sun started to sink past its zenith in the sky and he was beginning to feel like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin just to escape, he went home.

‘Home’ being his childhood house. Not the empty house by campus that he used to share with Hunk and Pidge, where he now lived alone.

But everybody was out for the day, when he arrived. Gabi and Beni were both at school, Mamá and Papá were both at work. Laura moved out last year. Marco hadn’t lived here in ages… Of course no one was home. He didn’t even know why he’d come. The house felt eerily empty without the noisy Lacoste-McClains livening up every inch of it.

Listless, he ended up in the kitchen, rifling for something to eat to fill the time so he didn’t end up taking some kind of depressing nostalgia trip into his old bedroom (which had since been turned into a guest room). But as he rummaged through the pantry he stopped suddenly as he came across a fancy-looking whiskey bottle tucked behind a stack of tomato soup cans. It was out of place. _Too_ fancy, especially since their parents didn’t even drink, and it was covered with a film of dust that suggested it had been stowed back here for quite some time. Curiosity piqued, Lance dragged the bottle out to the forefront of the shelf, turning it around to see the full rounded shape of the bottle, and to get a closer look at the tiny card that was attached to its neck by a curled, plastic ribbon.

He opened the card, and saw none other than Marco’s handwriting inside. _Welcome home, Keith!_

“Oh god dammit,” Lance hissed to himself, slapping the card closed before he’d even read past the word _‘Keith.’_ But after another moment, he opened it slowly and finished reading.

 

 

_Welcome home, Keith!_

_Saw this at Deer Park and immediately thought of that old school whiskey bottle you were carrying with you the day you left. This one has actual whiskey in it still though lol. Untouched by the sea. I don’t think drinking age laws apply to merfolk, but you can’t share with Lance till he’s 21! ;) He’s gonna hate that haha! I hope your trip was fulfilling. Looking forward to getting to know you better._

     -  _ _Marco__

 

 

“Joke’s on you, Marco,” Lance muttered, totally aware that he was talking to himself like a crazy person but beyond caring, “I turned twenty-one three months ago. And Keith isn’t here, so as far as I’m concerned, this is for me.”

A particularly dark and spiteful cloud was gathering over his head, and he knew it wasn’t good for him but it felt good to just indulge that feeling for once instead of pushing it to the side so he could get through the day without losing his mind. Leaving his car keys on the dining room table, he threw the bottle into an empty drawstring sports bag hanging from the hook by the door and headed out into the sunlight.

He only meant to drink a little of it. (After all, he wasn’t really a drinker or partier in general, he had too much shit to do between studying and homework and working to pay rent and doing his rounds at the SLRC.) But before he knew it, he’d been down at the grotto for hours and had flipped through an entire shelf’s worth of Keith’s old drawing pads. His stomach was on fire and his throat ached and his eyes were stinging and three-quarters of the bottle was gone. It felt like he’d been stuck over a gas burner on low for the last two and a half years, and now the knob was finally turning up, inching past the point of no return. When it started clicking, he’d go nuclear.

But for now, he was on a comfortable rising simmer as he picked through the pieces of his childhood. Every inch of this cave held a thousand memories, each old keepsake like a window to the past. It was almost nice, at first, indulging in the desire to relive it all, back when everything was full of magic. He pulled the ukulele from the very top of the shelf where it had sat untouched for ages. Neither of them had ever gotten very good at playing it, but Lance had tried to write Keith a song when they were sixteen, and Keith had loved it even though Lance knew full well it was cheesy and terrible. It was a summer Sunday, and Lance had driven way up north where the tourists were scarce and the tide pools were aplenty and they’d wasted away the afternoon doing absolutely nothing. Lance had pulled the ukulele from his duffel bag while Keith wasn’t looking and started to play it without any preamble because he thought it’d be funny. Keith didn’t laugh though. He just stopped, turned in the water, and came down with this dopey-ass expression that slew Lance where he sat. In that moment, he looked so in love that Lance felt it, physically, as if Keith was basking him in it. Projecting it out at him like… like lamplight, and cinema, and moonbeams.

Times like that, it was easy to believe in magic. It was easy to believe in love as a force as nature, ubiquitous and changeless, keeping people like Lance and Keith together as simply as gravity kept them from falling into space.

Realizing his eyes had been closed for quite some time, Lance stopped plucking at the ukulele strings, opened his eyes, and put it back. He didn’t remember all the chords, anyway.

The warmth that memory had filled him with faded as swiftly as the hum of the strings, a cassette tape unwinding, leaving him a tangled mess as he pawed at the notebooks again.

Because you know what?

It wasn’t _fair_.

It wasn’t fair how the first notebook on the shelf—almost a decade old now—was crayon doodles and tic tac toe, and how the last one was full of portraits of imagined people, drawings of land creatures Keith had never even seen, each tuft of fur painstakingly sketched out in fine graphite, jaw-dropping drawings Lance didn’t even know Keith had _done._ The pages blurred together and the sky grew dark but Lance kept looking. The last one—a full spread of Redwoods—was left unfinished, and it wasn’t fucking fair. None of it was fair. It wasn’t fair how Keith was still gone and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t fair how Pidge and Hunk had both moved out and left him alone in that house they picked out together, Pidge for her dumb brother and Hunk for his stupid girlfriend. It wasn’t fair how the ocean was literally dying and he was still working at the stupid SLRC doing things like tallying up fish counts in a spreadsheet underneath a sign that read ‘Save the Whales’ in cursive. Who cares that they’d hired him on after his internship? Who cares that if he put in his time for long enough, eventually he’d be going on dives or working in the lab? It didn’t mean anything. Worthless. The world was ending and he was filing goddamn paperwork about it, as if the numbers weren’t all gonna change tomorrow. He knew they would change because _everything_ changed. Even forces of nature.

It was too much. He stood up, swaying as he did so, and tried to shove the last notebook back onto the shelf. But he overshot and stumbled _(woah, that’s a little closer than I thought it was)_ and bent the cover on the side of the shelf instead. There was a brief moment of guilty panic as he looked at the notebook in a pulsing, burning daze—

—followed by a visceral dismissal from an ugly place in his heart. Whatever. It’s not like _Keith_ was around to give him shit for bending it, right? _Shit_. Fuck shit fuck fuck _fuck_ —

He sucked in a watery breath as he tried in vain to bend the notebook back to its original shape, then gave up and just shoved it back on the shelf. He had no idea when he’d started to cry but there was kinda no stopping it once it started. No closing the floodgates now.  

Overwhelmed, stumbling, he somehow made it back to the table even though he could barely see, let alone stand, and as he fell back into his chair the bottle rolled off and shattered on the rocky ledge. Dissociated entirely, he watched the whiskey trickle down into the water, taking a couple shards of glass with it, and wondered how many millions of years it’d take for that glass to whittle down into nothing again and return to the Earth.

He was still wondering about this when a smallish figure slid down into the cave entrance an unknowable amount of minutes or hours later.

“ _Jesus_ , Lance!” she yelled as soon as she saw him at the table. “Do you have any idea how much you scared us? Your keys were on the table and the front door was wide open!”

“Sorry,” Lance slurred, wiping hastily at his tear-stained face. Shit, did he really leave the door open? How stupid was he? “Why’re you even.. doing here,” he wondered, blinking over at his sister in utter confusion. Didn’t she move out like, a year ago?

“Oh my god, you’re drunk.”

“Why’re you here,” he repeated as she attempted to forcibly lift him from his seat. He attempted to help her but it was like there was nothing left inside him, not even blood or sinew or bones.

Somehow Laura managed to drag him all the way back to his own house anyway, drunk and sobbing, babbling nonsense into her shoulder about rising ocean temperatures and shrinking ice sheets and the looming extinction of Chinese dolphins.

Out of the goodness of her heart, Laura didn’t mention that night after Lance sobered up.

But Lance didn’t go back to the grotto again.

The Dropbox of empty photos was enough; he couldn’t stand to see the still lake and the unlit lights and the empty chair where Keith used to sit and say things like _“go fish”_ even though they were playing rummy.

There were well over ten thousand photos now. Every morning he scrolled the twelve new photos from the day before, but of course, they were always the same. The bottom drawer was overflowing with hidden memorabilia now too, so he had to put the Christmas present he bought for Keith in junior year in the middle drawer under his folded jeans. It was a framed picture of Lance flipping off the camera, which had provided him a few seconds of vindictive catharsis and not much else. He imagined Keith blinking up at him contritely as he opened it and saying, _I'm sorry I took so long._

He imagined telling Keith, _It's okay. You can make it up to me._ He imagined laying out on the rocks with him till the sun rose like they did when they were kids, hovering close for warmth, pushing the boundaries, no fear, no self-preservation, eyes pointed in tandem to the horizon. He started sleeping with the walkie talkie under his pillow again, because when he woke up in the morning light, half-asleep and half-dreaming, sometimes, he swore he heard Keith’s voice coming through.

 _We’ll see you next spring_ , Lance’s arctic friends had said at the end of sophomore year, and true to their word, they did.

The earth continued turning on its axis, stealing the winter away from California and the end from Lance’s fifth semester in college. The ground beneath his feet swung him around with thoughtless centrifugal force through the New Year, through January, and February, and March. Another year gone, dragging him along even as it left him behind, slipping away through his fingers the way fading dreams do to you in the earliest morning hour, just slowly enough to let you see what you’re losing and just quickly enough to get away. Allura, Coran, and Romelle met him down at the grotto halfway through spring on their yearly migration back north, and they were unsurprised that Keith still hadn't returned from his journey.

They didn't say it—probably out of a mixture of pity and respect—but Lance saw it on their faces.

“We are transient creatures,” Coran reminded him as they left to return north, with a hand on the shoulder and a fatherly nod, and Lance felt the undertow then, tugging tugging tugging at his gut like a serrated hook, tearing as the mer left the grotto.

The deadly riptide he never saw coming.

The words no one dared to say.

_Keith is gone._

 

 

* * *

**[** **Saturday** \- 4:56pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Saturday** _\- 7:36pm_

 **(** nah i cant, im busy. i have a paper to write sorry **)**

_7:37pm_

**( P )** **(** Boo bitch do it on Sunday **!** You haven’t come out with us in a billion years **)**

 **( H ) (** Yeah, come on Lance, pleeeasseee pretty please **)**

 ****_7:40pm_

 **( P )** **(** Blease. I will pay you two (count them) two whole dollars **)**

_7:45pm_

**(** sorry guys, no can do **)**

_7:47pm_

**( P )** **(** Fine >:( no dollars for you **)**

 **( H ) (** Pidge lmao. It’s okay Lance, just text us if you change your mind! **)**

* * *

  

* * *

  **[←]  Laura [:]**

 

 **Sunday** _\- 9:45pm_

 **( L )** **(** Laaaaaance I miss you. I keep calling you lol but I think my timing sucks sdlkfjgg ANYWAY do u wanna go hiking next weekend or smth **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Monday** _\- 2:10pm_

 **( H ) (** Hey budddyy. Sucks you couldn’t make it the other day **)**

 **** **( P )** **(** Yeah, matt says he misses your face **)**

 **(** You wanna go see that new horror movie tonight? The one with the trailer that almost made hunk pee his pants? Everyone’s going **)**

_2:13pm_

**( H ) (** This is libel and slander and you’ll be hearing from my lawyer, Pidge **)**

_2:14pm_

**( P ) (** sdjkhg your comma placement makes it sound like i AM the lawyer **)**

_4:19pm_

**( P ) (** ? Lance? **)**

_6:52pm_

**( P ) (** still writing that paper, huh **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Laura [:]**

 

 **Monday** _\- 6:24pm_

 **(** whoops **)**

 **(** dsklhfsd I’m sorry i keep leaving my phone at work **)**

 **(** um maybe? hiking does sound fun. I’ll let you know if i have time, i’ve kind of been working a lot lately **)**

_6:29pm_

**( L )** **(** Okay!! Just let me know. I feel like I’ve barely seen you in ages **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Tuesday** _\- 11:49am_

 **(** whoops **)**

 **(** yeah i was still working on that paper, sorry for not responding >.< **)**

_12:14pm_

**( H ) (** Ah, gotcha. It’s okay. Tonight maybe? **)**

 **(** We’re gonna go out dancinggg **)**

_3:20pm_

**(** ...you hate dancing tho ? **)**

_3:21pm_

**( H ) (** Yeah but you don’t **)**

 **(** Matt and Shay are coming, plus Nyma and Rolo maybe! **)**

 **(** Matt’s bringing a few friends too from the astrophysics dept. It’s gonna be fun **)**

 **(** This place has karaoke and $1 shots after 10pm… wink wink.. Plus Pidge is finally old enough to get in, remember!! **)**

_9:31pm_

**(** sorry hunk I have to finish that essay still. it’s kicking my ass. **)**

 **(** and i work basically all week, im pulling a few doubles. raincheck for the weekend maybe? **)**

_9:25pm_

**( H ) (** Mmkay I’m holding you to it ! **)**

 **( P )** **[** SpongebobsEssay_THE.jpeg **]**

 **(** ^^^Lance right now apparently **)**

 **(** What’s this paper even on? I feel like you’ve been writing it for weeks, damn **)**  

 ****_10:36pm_

 **(** the mass death of ocean coral: a historical deconstruction and projective timeline **)**

 **(** idk why I’m even doing this though **)**

_10:47pm_

**( H ) (** Doing what? That paper topic? **)**  

_10:48pm_

**(** writing this paper, studying this stuff in school... it’s already too late. it’s not like ONE more guy with a degree in oceanography or marine biology or whatever the fuck is gonna be able to save the stupid ocean. so it just. doesnt even matter **)**

 **(** the damage is already too great for any one person to have any affect **)**

 **(** especially if that person is me **)**

 **(** the ocean is doomed **)**

 **(** ipso facto the planet is doomed **)**

_10:51pm_

**(** lol **)**

_10:52pm_

**( H ) (** ........Dude. **)**

 **( P ) (** Um **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[** Tuesday - 10:53pm - _1 missed call from Hunk_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 10:53pm - _1 missed call from Hunk_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 10:54pm - _1 missed call from Pidge_ **]**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

_10:55pm_

**( H ) (** Are you okay man? I just tried to call you and you didn’t pick up **)**

 **( P ) (** Cool we’ll just pretend that wasn’t weird at all. ok **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[** Tuesday - 10:58pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 10:59pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 10:59pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 11:00pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 11:05pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

 **[** Tuesday - 11:26pm - _1 missed call from Laura_ **]**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Wednesday** _\- 2:04am_

 **(** sorry i left my phone in the other room! my bad **)**

 **(** i’m fine, i’m just a little busy and distracted right now. totally fine though **)**

_8:44am_

**( H ) (** It's okay. And hey, I stopped by your apt but you weren’t there **)**

 **(** Check behind the flower pot, I left you a surprise!! **)**

_3:02pm_

**( P ) [** sdlflksdhflsd.gif **]**

_5:55pm_

**( P ) [** 10-31-2007.jpeg **]**

_11:36pm_

**( P ) [** infinite-recursion-of-frogs.gif **]**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Laura [:]**

 

 **Wednesday** _\- 2:04pm_

 **( L )** **(** Hey so, I just wanna say that I know you’re going through a hard time, and I know something’s wrong in a big way, and I’m here if you ever wanna talk about it. I mean. It’s just me. You can talk to me. And I really wish you would. Hunk and Pidge talk to me and the rest of the family more than you do these days. The whole family misses you  **)**

 **( L )** **(** That’s all  **)**

* * *

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Thursday** _\- 3:27am_

 **( P ) (** I fucking miss you Lance **)**

 **(** There. I said it **)**

 **(** I’ve only seen you like TWICE since the semester started! GOD!!! **)**

_8:05am_

**( H ) (** Yeah. I second that **)**

_6:01pm_

**( H ) (** Hey Lance? Your mom says you haven’t been home in over 2 months?? Laura says you haven’t been answering her calls lately either, and not just on Tuesday night when we asked her to call you. **)**

 **(** What’s up with that?? Laura says call her please. She sounded kinda upset dude **)**

* * *

 

 

* * *

  **[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Friday** _\- 7:09pm_

 **( P ) (** I’m taking your radio silence to mean you’re getting your shit together and preparing yourself for this weekend **)**

 **(** Because the alternative is that you’re just a dick **)**

 **( H ) (** Pidge. **)**

 **( P ) (** What? I’m speaking in hypotheticals. **)**

 **(** Schrodinger’s Dick. Not a dick until he ditches us tomorrow **)**

_7:11pm_

**( H ) (** 10am tomorrow Lance. Pls don’t forget :) It’s gonna be fun I promise! **)**

* * *

 

* * *

**[←]  Hunk, Pidge [:]**

 

 **Saturday** _\- 8:18am_

 **( P ) (** ITS THE WEEKEND, BITCH **)**

 **( H ) (** Text us when you’re awake! There are Plans™ underway **)**

_8:56am_

**( P ) (** Lance **)**

_9:16am_

**( P ) (** Lance **)**

_9:41am_

**( P ) (** Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance Lance **)**

 **( P ) (** LEANDRO SOCORRO LACOSTE-MCCLAIN **)**

_10:04am_

**( H ) (** Lance come on man **)**

_11:27am_

**( H ) (** Ok that’s it, we’re coming over whether you like it or not **)**

 **( P ) (** Operation Tough Love is a go **)**

 **( H ) (** I thought we agreed not to call it that Pidge **)**

 **(** It’s called Operation We Love You But This Has Gone Too Far **)**

 **(P) (** Same difference??????? **)**

* * *

 

 

“What do you guys want,” Lance grumbled in the open doorway, rubbing his eyes and squinting in the too-bright May sunlight.

It was still weird whenever they knocked on his door without just using their keys and walking in, since they used to live here too, once upon a time. Honestly, he still felt a little betrayed that they’d moved out and left him alone here, just because Hunk wanted to live with his girlfriend and Matt needed a roommate, and they wanted to live nearer to the buildings where the comp sci and engineering classes were held. Even though they’d asked him if it was okay first and if he’d be able to find another roommate. Of course he’d said yes... and then never even looked for a replacement. For almost two years now he’d been meaning to find a roommate or two to replace Hunk and Pidge (inner city rent was insanely expensive on his own, even for a place this tiny and ragged), but the SLRC paid pretty well, and he just didn't want people in his space right now. It wasn’t like he had anything else to spend his money on anyway. Might as well spend it on the only thing he did want, which was to be alone. Hence why he’d been highkey ignoring his phone lately, and hence why this sudden appearance at ass o’clock in the morning on a Saturday felt kinda like an ambush.

Turned out he was right, anyway.

“This is an intervention,” Pidge announced, and together she and Hunk shoved their way into Lance’s apartment. “Jeez, Lance, open the blinds, will you? You need sunlight.”

“I just woke up,” Lance defended haughtily, “cut me some slack.”

“It's noon!” Hunk said, and promptly tripped over a giant stack of textbooks that were sitting in the middle of the hall between the dining nook and living room, ending up in a pile of laundry before righting himself. Hunk sighed as he glanced around at the mess that was Lance’s life: dusty yellow light bleeding in through closed blinds, old takeout, angler fish skeleton with a wrinkled Cuban flag draped over the top and hiding it from view. Grimacing, he walked over and pulled the flag down. Thumbtacks scattered, still loosely hanging onto the flag from when Lance had ripped it off the wall to cover that stupid fish, and rolled noisily across the hardwood floor. Lance heard the incoming lecture from a mile away. “Lance—”

“Don't.”

“Lance, sit down, please.”

Lance crossed his arms over his bare chest, still standing in the entryway by the front door and refusing to get comfortable. “Guys, I am _so_ not doing this with you.”

“Fine,” Pidge snapped, “stand then, but enough is enough. We love Keith too, Lance, but it's been _three years._ ”

Lance stubbornly whipped his head away to stare at a blank patch on the wall.

“I know this is hard to hear,” Pidge pushed, “but you can't mourn forever—”

“I'm not mourning!” he cried out, throwing his arms up so fast that one clipped the wall. “What the fuck, Pidge! I’m _not mourning,_ Keith is coming back!”

“It's been three years,” Hunk said, a lot more gently. It stung just the same, though. While Lance wasn’t watching he had folded up the Cuban flag with painstaking care, and now he was setting it on the coffee table. “He was only supposed to be gone for one.”

“Look, I'm not saying I'm not pissed off and hurt that he's taking so goddamn long,” Lance huffed, also pissed off about Hunk touching his flag but unable to pin down _why_ , “but he’s coming back. You guys— You don't understand. He wouldn't leave me without saying anything.” To his dismay his level voice was beginning to break, the anger destabilizing and leaving the distress cold and vulnerable. The first week after he met Keith, when they were just two stupid ten year olds fumbling their way into a feisty friendship, Lance thought Keith had left him. But Keith’s offended response when they met again three days later had been: _I would have said goodbye._ “He would have told me if he didn’t mean to come back.” Lance clung to that now more than ever, his voice wavering dangerously. “He would’ve said goodbye.”

“Okay,” Hunk relented. “But,” and he rubbed his neck sheepishly, “I hate saying this, but…”

Pidge helped him out. “We can't rule out that something might’ve happened to him.”

Lance was silent for a moment, thinking now about the time Keith faced down a killer whale for him. Thinking about the jar of shark teeth in his bedroom. Thinking how he’d survived on his own in the open sea as a child, lost and alone. If he could do that, he could do anything.

“Keith is tough.”

“We know,” Pidge agreed, “but the ocean is huge. And Keith… He should've been back by now. Look, we're not trying to convince you of anything. We just want you to be okay, and as long as you're expecting Keith back any minute, you're not okay. Pretend all you want, but we know you’re not. So maybe... maybe it's time to consider letting go.”

“I'm not letting go of anything!” Lance fumed, stalking out of the entryway. “Look, you guys can give up on him if you want, but don't expect _me_ to.”

“Okay, okay,” Hunk relented. “So maybe not today or even this month, but just think about it, alright?”

“Nyma was asking about you again on Tuesday,” Pidge added, and Lance shoved his aquaculture notes off the dining room table onto the floor. “Just saying!” she backtracked. “Jesus!”

“I think clubbing was probably not the best idea,” Hunk suggested. “But we _are_ getting you out of the house though. We're doing something fun today.”

Lance rolled his eyes, but the worst of his vitriol was already gone. On the floor with the papers. He was still angry, but Pidge shoved her way into his personal space and hugged him anyway.

“Don't be mad,” she mumbled into the hug. “Sorry for ambushing you like this.”

Letting his cheek come to rest on the top of her head, Lance sighed, feeling the last dregs of his anger slipping quickly out of his grasp. He couldn’t seem to hold onto anything, these days. Not even the few pieces of himself that still felt raw and present and real.

“I know,” he relented, “I know. Okay yeah, fine. I guess I could use some fresh air. What's your stupid plan then?”

“Boardwalk!” Hunk announced from behind her, scarcely able to contain his glee.

And as much as Lance blanched at the prospect of carnival music and spinny rides when he was feeling this dead inside, in the end, a little impromptu day of fun was exactly what he needed.

He hadn’t been out to do anything of this nature in at least a year. He’d been so swamped with classes and homework and studying and taking every extra shift they tossed his way at the SLRC like bottom-of-the-bucket fish to fill out every spare moment of the day, that he hadn’t given himself time to just kick it like this. It was hard to have fun when he was feeling this shitty, so it was easier to just… not try. But, Pidge and Hunk were the actual best friends ever. They didn’t try and force him to laugh or smile or anything, which was exactly what he needed. He wasn’t sure why he’d been avoiding them in the first place. It was just Hunk and Pidge. Business as usual.

The Boardwalk hadn’t changed all that much since they were kids. The Little Dipper (namesake for Keith’s pet harbor seal, whom Lance used to still see on occasion bathing on the rocks outside the grotto before he stopped going) had been replaced by a different ride, and the arcade had been updated with more modern graphics half a dozen times, but other than that it was largely the same place it had been ten years ago. Walking in the main entrance was like diving into a bath of nostalgia. There was a specific smell to the Boardwalk that existed nowhere else on Earth; the exact middle point between delightfully greasy food, grating metal, driftwood, sea salt, and sunshine. _It’s the smell of fun,_ Lance always used to say whenever Pidge obsessively tried to pinpoint the exact chemical makeup of the scent.

“Hmm, smell that?” Pidge nudged him hard in the ribs as they wandered into the crowd, and Lance cracked his first smile all day. “Smells like fun or something…”

“Shut up,” he laughed.

Pidge and Hunk kept him busy all afternoon. Apparently they’d been planning this for weeks and they refused to let him pay for anything, even though he hadn’t bought a season pass this year (for the first time in his life). Of course he tried to protest, but Pidge and Hunk were good at distracting him. They rode the Ferris wheel, went through the haunted house, rode every kiddie ride in the entire kids’ section of the Boardwalk just for kicks, and then went on the Giant Dipper six times in a row. With the wind in his hair and Pidge and Hunks’ screams in his ears Lance began to feel like he was dancing backward in time, counter-clockwise, all the way back to the days when they were ten, the first year they were allowed to come here alone and unsupervised. His heart was a helium-filled balloon in his chest, the sun was brighter than he remembered it being yesterday, and all he could think as they wobbled off the rollercoaster after their sixth go, weak-kneed and giggling, was: _This isn’t so bad._

Boardwalk food was terrible and over-priced. It made him feel like he was gaining ten pounds in real-time, but it tasted freakin’ good and it was so, so worth it.

“How fast do you think I can eat this pretzel?” Lance asked, slurping noisily on his soda, at which point Pidge whipped out her phone, accidentally flinging a few french fries across the table, and offered to time him.

“Dude, please don’t choke,” Hunk worried. “We’re having so much fun, don’t ruin it with a hospital trip.”

“The funnest games always end in hospital trips,” Lance shrugged. “It’s the law of friendship. I know this from experience.” But he did take a normal bite like a normal human being instead of trying to inhale it all at once, if only to ease Hunk’s mind. Plus, he didn’t even wanna know what percentage of this nacho cheese was actually cheese, but it _was_ the best thing he’d tasted in weeks, so he wanted to savor it.

Hunk swallowed his cotton candy, pointing at Lance accusatively. “I take offense,” he complained. “We’ve never sent you to the hospital.”

“Oh.” Lance frowned. Shit, that was right.  “I— Sorry, that was Keith. The time he tackled me off my surfboard and I sprained my wrist. I forgot, that was before you guys knew about him.”

On the bench beside him, Pidge stiffened, and just like that the carefree mood was gone, with no real effort on anyone’s part. Just a few careless words. A film of dust that took hours to collect, blown from the floor by a slamming door.

“Right,” she replied carefully. “I forgot about that too.”

The sounds of the Boardwalk (scraping metal, screaming gulls overhead, laughing children) filled the space after Pidge’s words when no one picked up the thread of conversation.

“Um. Lance?” Hunk said after a moment, at which point Lance realized he’d been staring at his uneaten pretzel without taking a second bite for a solid minute now. “You okay, buddy?”

“I—yeah,” Lance said, and he was being honest even though it felt kinda like his eyes were watering up. _That_ didn’t make sense. “I’m okay,” he reiterated. “It’s nostalgia,” he guessed, shrugging half-heartedly, which was also true. It was something he’d been simmering in all day, this deluge of the bittersweet. “I’m feeling... really, really old right now. Do you know that you guys tried to take me to the Boardwalk the first week I knew Keith? When he was still healing from that gash and couldn’t swim? You were trying to apologize for ditching me for the mall. History repeats itself, I guess. This time I was the one who ditched you guys though...”

Hunk set down his bucket of cotton candy, and the hollow sound drew Lance’s attention. He was babbling, he knew that, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

“I brought him cotton candy on the third day,” Lance whispered. “He still couldn’t go back in the water yet and I was trying so hard to make him like me. I thought if I brought him the most sugary thing ever.. Positive association, you know? He wouldn’t shut up about it afterward. Every time I tried to leave to go home for lunch he had another question about cotton candy up his sleeve, trying to understand how it worked, how it disappeared in your mouth like that. I thought he was such an idiot. I was the idiot though. He understood it just fine. He just d-didn’t want me to g-go.”

“Laance,” Hunk whined brokenly, and Lance heard shuffling around the table even though he couldn’t really see since his eyes were swimming. A moment later two warm bodies were pressed in on both sides of him, shoving into his space as he deposited his pretzel on the paper tray and sniffed messily, pressing his palms to his eyes as the first tears fell.

“I’m s-sorry,” he managed, _hicc_ ing all the while, “I don’t know why I’m crying, I’m ha-aving fun, I swear. This is s-so embarrassing.”

“Stop apologizing and let us hug you,” Hunk mumbled.

“I really am having fun,” Lance insisted, “it’s just—it’s a _lot_.”

“Ugh,” Pidge commiserated. “It _is_ a lot, isn’t it?”

Lance giggled; it was surreal because his laughter was genuine. A strange mix of happy and sad, laughing and crying. It felt kinda good.

“What are _you_ looking at?” Pidge demanded, and Lance peeked over his hands to see who Pidge was telling off. It turned out it was a seagull chilling across the table, eating one of the french fries Pidge had flung earlier, and that had Lance giggling twice as hard. He wiped his eyes again and then adjusted his position so that he could throw his arms around Pidge and Hunk and reel them in for a proper hug.

“I love you guys,” he sighed. He didn’t know what else to say about this moment, but it was okay. They understood what he wanted to say, and he knew that. That was the best thing about lifelong friends. There was something infinitely comforting about resting between two people he didn’t have to explain a single thing about himself to.

Hunk squeezed. “We love you too.”

“Can we go ride the skyline?” Lance wondered. “It’s almost sunset and it’s pretty much the only thing we haven’t ridden yet.”

Sunset at the Boardwalk was always a magical affair. There were never any two the same color, and tonight’s was no exception. The sky was already beginning to bleed tropical orange near the horizon, and the scattered clouds far above shone pink around the edges wherever they faced the descending golden sun. You couldn’t see the sun anymore from the ground, but as soon as the line for the skyline carried them up the stairs and toward the loading area, he could see the very edge of the sun glinting out from behind the roller coaster, godrays flashing through the tracks and the metal beams, softened enough now to stare at directly without having to squint. The skyline had always been Lance’s favorite part of the whole Boardwalk. It ran in a straight line right along the edge of the park, where the beachside amusement park ended and the beach sand began, leading down to the sea.

“To your right, you’ll see California,” Lance joked in his best flight attendant voice as their gondola left the loading dock and the floor disappeared under their feet. “And to your left you’ll see the majestic and salty Pacific Ocean.” Gesturing grandly out over the side of the gondola, he took a deep breath, inhaling the intoxicating smell of ocean. Up here, the wind was stronger than it was down below, which was strangely grounding. It made him feel more present in his skin than he’d felt for weeks. Months, maybe. He was sitting on the far left with Pidge in the middle squeezed between him and Hunk. They always gave him the oceanside seat, and he loved them so much.

The gondola creaked on, and Pidge pointed out the same old lost hats and flip flops that had sat below for years in hard to reach places. Some things never changed.

Sometimes, though… sometimes the one thing you never thought could possibly change was the thing that changed most of all.

“It’s not just Keith,” Lance said, when they’d traveled about a third of the way across the gap. “It’s not just about him, I mean.”

“Yeah, we know,” Pidge responded lightly.

“I think I’m gonna quit,” he admitted. It was the first time he'd ever said it aloud. Baby steps, right?

“The SLRC?” Hunk asked, faking nonchalance even though the alarm was evident in his voice. “Why? When?”

“Tomorrow?” Lance shrugged. “Yesterday?”

“Why?” Pidge repeated.

“It’s…” This part was trickier. How to put it into words? How to funnel the cosmic futility that sat on his shoulders when he knew he could call out of work and the only difference would be a different set of feet walking the same bucket of fish to the same shark. A different set of hands filing away the same paperwork into the same filing cabinet. A different set of eyes raking over the data for the same amount of hours and the exact same output. How useless he felt. How helpless. How lost and small and fleeting and tired. So fucking tired. “It’s not for me,” he settled on. “It’s not what I thought it’d be, I guess.”

“So what the hell are you gonna do then?”

“Drop out of school and become a beach bum.”

“Lance,” Hunk scolded.

“I’m kidding,” he sighed, even though it was sorely tempting. “I just.. I don’t know yet.”

“Well if I know you at all,” Pidge said, “you’ll figure it out. You always figure something out.”

“Yeah,” Hunk agreed enthusiastically, “you’re the ‘creative solutions’ guy. That’s like, your whole thing!”

“You guys aren’t disappointed in me?” Lance murmured, willing himself not to tear up again. He’d been holding onto this for so long, and he’d been so afraid. “I feel like I’ve gone and fucked everything up. I don’t even know if I’m in the right major anymore and I’m one year from graduating. I’ve changed it _four times_ already. I’m pretty sure my advisor hates me. I’ve wasted so much time.”

“What? No,” Hunk said. “Dude, Pidge’s mom changed her major six times and it took her six years to get her bachelor’s degree, and yet, now she has a PhD and gets invited to speak at conferences. I’m pretty sure there’s no right way to do anything. Quitting one job is nothing, Lance, especially if it’s—” He paused, looking to Pidge for help.

“Especially if it’s doing _this_ to you,” she finished haughtily.

“Yeah, I know,” Lance agreed, but it still felt hollow. He turned seaward again, increasingly aware of the approaching station at which point they’d have to jump off the gondola whether they were done with this conversation or not. For now, his eyes roamed over the patchwork sea, her distant waves indiscernible from microscopic ripples. “I just don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do now,” he sighed, more to himself than to Hunk and Pidge, and about much more than just the SLRC. “That’s all.”

 

**. . .**

 

The next week he actually felt a lot better. The thought of actually giving up hope on Keith coming home still made his stomach curdle, but he did make a concerted effort to start opening his blinds again in the morning. Stupid as it sounds, the sunlight helped. He tackled the piles of dirty dishes and did a few loads of laundry, and yeah, it wasn’t a lot, but he didn't miss a homework assignment this week either and that was worth something.

It was a Monday morning when he walked into the SLRC thirty minutes early for his shift with a handwritten resignation letter. Iverson stared him down as he accepted it but Lance was unwavering.

“Why?” Iverson asked, glancing over the letter and seeing right away that it gave no indication beyond _‘for personal reasons.’_ “Lance, I don’t understand, you have such a bright future. You’re just going to toss it out the window?”

“With all due respect, sir,” Lance said, “I’m not tossing anything anywhere. I’m just going to pursue other options.”

Sighing deeply, Iverson leaned on the front desk, staring him down even as the main lobby doors opened behind Lance’s back, letting in sunlight and a cacophony of chattering children. It was that time of year, when the field trips started happening again. They always picked up pace in the spring.

Lance wasn’t sure what he was waiting for here. He would be a good employee and finish out his last two weeks, of course, but he wanted to deliver his two weeks in writing, and now he had done so, and he wasn’t sure what he expected of Iverson in response. Beg him to stay, maybe? Tell Lance he was irreplaceable? Make him feel like he mattered to this place after all?

Finally, frustrated with Iverson’s steely gaze and lack of response, Lance allowed himself to become distracted by the entering class as they spread out in the lobby, pointing up with excitement at the photos on the wall and craning their necks up at the vaulted ceiling, conversing in small groups with hushed, overlapping whispers. Ducking out of the way for the teacher as she approached the desk, Lance’s eyes fell on a little boy wearing a puka shell necklace, who was straying away from the group toward the hall that led farther into the SLRC. It was only once he caught Lance raising an eyebrow at him that he froze and went back to the group.

“Is it because I never let you work the field trips?” Iverson said suddenly, and Lance blinked at him in surprise.

“No,” he said, “no, that’s not it.”

But later, as he was feeding Sarahi her midday helping of fish and saw that puka shell necklace kid watching him intently, as if Lance held the key to all the mysteries of the ocean, he wondered if perhaps that had something to do with it after all.

“Hey,” he called out, softly enough so that only the kid noticed because he was looking right at Lance. “C’mere for a sec!” He grinned at the kid and beckoned him over from the open doorway where he had lingered as the group of students passed by in the hall. The kid took a step inside, then glanced back toward the group. “It’s fine,” Lance assured him with a conspiratorial grin, “if you hurry they won’t notice.”

A grin split across the kid's face and he skipped the couple of feet between Lance and the open door, leaning enthusiastically toward the tank, which he was just high enough to see over the lip of. Lance put an arm out, keeping him from putting his hands up on the ledge. As soon as he saw Sarahi in there he gasped and looked up at Lance.

“She’s inside this week because she’s not feeling well,” Lance explained. “Usually she’s in one of the bigger tanks outdoors, where you guys are gonna go feed the seals later. You know, she’ll probably grow to twenty feet long, if we can make her all better. She’s gonna be real happy to go back to the ocean, then, huh?”

“That’s the biggest tank there is,” the kid said, and Lance giggled in response because, well, he wasn’t wrong. “Woah!” the kid whispered in awe as Sarahi turned in a graceful circle and came over to them, her silhouette rippling beneath the crystal water. Lance glanced back into the hallway. It looked like the last stragglers of the field trip group were passing by.

“Watch this,” Lance said, sensing time was running out, and dipped his hand into the water as Sarahi approached them.

As was customary, she reached her flat head up and nudged it into Lance’s hand, like some kind of water puppy. She was a lot bigger now than she’d been when Lance started here, but in the grand scheme of things, she was still just a baby. She had her whole life ahead of her, and someday, when she was faraway in the place where she truly belonged, her stint here in the Santa Cruz would be nothing more than a distant memory to her.

“Can I pet her too?” the kid pleaded, and it hurt Lance’s heart, but he had to immediately shake his head no.

“Sorry,” he said, and began to lead the kid back toward the open door so he could rejoin his group before they’d gone outside. “But you know, when you grow up, you can do anything you want.”

“I wanna work here like you with sharks!” the kid blurted, and then sprinted away down the hallway without saying thank you or goodbye, as kids are wont to do. Lance waved at him nonetheless and smiled all the way through the rest of his shift.

“The hell are you so happy about?” James asked him at the end of the day as they hung up their lanyards together, and Lance thought about telling him that he’d quit that morning.

But, the truth was, that wasn’t why he was smiling.

 

**. . .**

 

“Oi, look who’s remembered we exist.”

“Sorry, Laura,” Lance mumbled, scratching his neck with shame as he stood on the porch of his childhood home in the afternoon glow. “What are you even doing here anyway?”

“Some of us like to visit our younger siblings,” she sniffed at him, but almost immediately was derailed as Gabi and Beni shoved into the entryway like puppies to see who was at the door. “Oh my god,” she sighed, “I’m messing with you, come inside already.”

So he did. And he let everyone talk at him for two whole hours, doing all the work of catching up so he wouldn’t have to. He knew they were doing that on purpose, and he let it happen gratefully. Listened to Gabi’s tales about the softball team. Commiserated patiently while Beni complained about his horrible new job at a surf shop and how half the customers were braindead. Snorted into the coffee Mamá pushed into his hands as Laura explained how she and her new boyfriend had met, which was when she got stuck in a tree on campus. All in all, it was a pretty nice visit, until Beni went and brought up Keith.

“Are you gonna go down to the grotto while you’re here?” Beni asked, lacking any sort of tact, as usual. Gabi immediately elbowed him, but it was too late. The words were already out there.

Lance shrugged, opting to poke his food around on his plate instead of answering.

Beside him, Laura poked at her own food, cautiously eyeing Lance. He ignored her. “When was the last time you visited it?” Beni pushed, ignoring the snap of Laura’s head toward him and her harsh glare. “Because there’s this new fish living down there and we wanna know what it is, and last time it rained the fronds covering the entrance washed away so I was wondering if you’d help me—”

 _“Beni!”_ Gabi hissed, and Papá’s glass clinked sharply on the table.

“I told you two you weren’t allowed to play down there,” he intoned in that _Dad’s Speaking Now_ voice, and Beni promptly shut up, while Gabi continued to glare at him as though he’d mortally betrayed the sibling code. It was much too late, though. Damage done.

Screwing up his face in the hopes that he’d look more angry and less devastated, Lance stood up sharply, the scrape of his chair and the clattering of his fork as he abandoned it deafening in the silence that had fallen over the family dinner table. The family froze, staring up at him, waiting. Lance let the wave of emotion wash over him, and settle, and only when it faded and he could feel his shoulders relaxing did he speak.

“I’m not going to the grotto, Beni.” Deep breath in, deep breath out. “There’s no reason to, okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Beni mumbled, slouching ever farther in his chair.

“No, it’s okay,” Lance answered easily. “It’s just not good for me, you know? I’m trying to...” _Move on,_ his brain supplied. His heart rejected it and rolled directly into the next thought. “I quit the SLRC today,” he said. “Wanted to tell you guys that. That’s why I’m here, I guess.”

“Leandro!” Mamá gasped, and Lance stepped out from in front of his chair.

“That’s all. Please don’t ask me about it,” he elaborated before anyone could interject. “It was a long time coming.”

The sound of a chair scraping followed his departure from the dinner table, and then Laura was catching up with him at the front door, grabbing him by the arm. “Hang on,” she was saying, “don’t—do this again. It’s not _fair_.”

“Do what?” Lance asked incredulously, one hand on the door handle, genuinely surprised when he turned to look back at her to find tears brimming in her eyes.

“Shut me out again,” she said, blinking the tears away. “You and me, we’re always going through the same exact shit and not talking to each other about it. Did you know I’ve changed my major four times too?”

“I—no,” he said. “I didn’t. I thought you just changed it that once freshman year?”

“No,” she said bluntly, “four times, as of this semester. Twin telepathy, right?” Lance had no idea what to say; he could tell she was getting at something, or working toward something, but in the end he wasn’t forced to fumble his way through it because she let him off the hook. “Just go get your breath of fresh air, or wherever you’re going,” she sighed, and then reared back and punched his shoulder playfully. “But don’t leave. Friggin’ _talk_ to me afterward.”

“Hey, uh...” Benito’s voice cut off Lance’s response as he opened his mouth. Lance glanced around Laura to see Gabi and Beni both standing in the hall behind her. Gabi was staring resolutely at her shoes while Beni glared at Papá as he pushed them both farther into the hall. “We’re sorry,” Beni finally said, dragging his feet contritely. “For hanging out at the grotto. I know you said not to go down there without you, but we just…”

“You never wanna go anymore,” Gabi finished, tugging on her ponytail.

“It’s okay,” Lance sighed. He understood, he really did. He’d been their age once, after all. “You can play down there if you want to, I really don’t mind. Just don’t bring your friends, okay? And don't go through Keith's stuff."

“We don’t!” Gabi assured him. “We don’t.”

“Thank you,” Mamá told the kids, ruffling their hair with affection. “ _Now_ you can go out and play.”

“It’s not _playing_ , _Madre_ ,” Gabi complained while they both scrambled to put on their shoes. There was a practiced routine to the whole thing, and Lance imagined there were probably some other high school kids waiting somewhere in the neighborhood for the two of them. “We’re in _high school_. Every time you say that in front of our friends I die a small death.”

“And I die a small death every time you call me 'Madre,'” she shot back as Lance moved aside to let them out the front door, holding it open to follow them outside after they’d sprinted down the steps.

Lance caught Laura’s glare, and gave her a reassuring grin. “Just some fresh air,” he said. “I’ll be back, okay? Promise.”

The spring evening was brisk and comfortable. There was almost no wind blowing, just an occasional soft breeze that kicked up lazily for half a second before fading again. Traffic was scarce so he barely had to glance both ways before jogging across the road. He was just in time to catch Beni and Gabi disappearing onto the stairs that led down to the little beach south of their house with a gaggle of laughing friends.

The flowers were in full bloom this time of year. The sun-yellow wildflowers, the overgrown bushes dotted with purple petals, their shaded leaves home to all manner of bugs and snails if you leaned in to look. He passed a few colorful patches of earth, trailing his hand along the old wooden fence. He’d often wondered why this thing was even here. It served virtually no purpose. It wasn’t even a fence, really, just a tiny piece of one stuck at random in this one spot on the cliff. Like someone had started on a fence one day and given up. Or maybe it was leftover from a time long gone by, from a hundred years ago when there were barely any houses here, the last living relic from another era.

The fence ended and his hand fell away, and he arrived at the old bench that sat beneath the oak tree, facing the sea. He sank into it, leaning back and gazing off in the direction of what used to be his favorite hiking path in all the world—the one that led to Keith, once upon a time. If he closed his eyes he could picture every inch of the climb. Every loose rock, every foothold, every plant, every turn and switchback. He knew it better than he knew his own heart.

But it wasn’t his anymore. Something in him had known that for a while, and hearing Benito admit that he and Gabi hung out down there at the grotto sometimes without him threw it all into sharp, painful relief. The fact that he and Keith weren’t kids anymore and they never would be again.

The sound of crunching gravel woke Lance from his thoughts, and he turned around to see who was coming, only to find himself staring up at somebody he loosely recognized.

“Hi,” the man said, smiling down at Lance warmly, welcomingly, and Lance found himself squinting up at him, desperately trying to figure out where he knew him from. Black hair with a patch of greyish-white, scar across the nose, buff as all hell… He was intensely familiar. “I uh, I couldn’t help but notice you over here looking a little blue,” the man went on. “Do you mind if I sit?”

Lance was so distracted trying to place this guy in his memory that he simply shook his head and scooted over.

“Nice day, huh?” the man noted, and Lance snorted. Weather talk from strangers. Jeez, he really was getting old. “Okay yeah, that was weak,” the guy admitted, and Lance snorted again, louder and more openly. “I’ve been jogging here almost every day for the last seven years or so,” the guy said, and that’s when it clicked into place. _Oh._ The buff jogger! Mr. Sabbagh’s husband! Holy shit! “I used to see you over here at least once a week like clockwork. Like a landmark, kinda. It’s been a few years though. I kinda wondered if something had happened to you.”

“Nah,” Lance said. “Just grew up and moved out, that’s all.”

“Lance, right?”

“What? How do you—?”

“You were one of my husband’s favorite students,” he laughed. “He was always trying to get you to see him waving when we went walking together on Saturdays. You usually looked like you were on a mission, though.”

Lance chuckled to himself, trying to imagine Mr. Sabbagh doing something like that, waving enthusiastically to a dumb high schooler across the street who was probably running full speed toward the beach with a surfboard under his arm. It didn’t sound like Mr. Sabbagh at all. “Yeah, I usually was,” he sighed, his eyes catching on the entrance to the grotto path.

“Takashi Shirogane,” the guy said, and held out a hand to shake Lance’s. He was caught off guard by the fact that he offered his left hand, and it took him a second to adjust and hold out his left to accept it. “So what brings you out here tonight?”

“Oh, you know,” Lance shrugged tiredly.  “Just… recalibrating, I guess.”

Takashi nodded sagely and got a little more comfortable on the bench, bringing one elbow up to rest on the back of it. “Been there,” he commiserated, and something about it sounded so sincere and genuine that Lance couldn’t help but believe him. He took another moment to take Takashi’s appearance. He was in great shape now, yeah, but parts of him suggested that he hadn’t always been, that maybe he’d had it a lot worse than Lance was having it right now. Like the vicious scar that stretched lengthwise across the bridge of his nose. Like his prosthetic right arm. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Something about Takashi’s gentle and understanding tone made him forego his usual _‘no.’_

“I fucked up,” Lance said simply. “Somewhere, somehow. I don’t know what I’m doing at all.”

“That’s a big assertion,” Takashi noted.

“I was gonna save the ocean,” Lance explained, and yeah, that was a big assertion too. He knew that. His whole life was an ever-growing pile of big assertions that he’d failed to follow through on. “Wanted to grow up and become an oceanographer or a marine biologist or.. or something,” he shrugged, “anything. But it’s not.. There’s nothing I can do. I’m just one person. I can’t do _everything_ , so it feels like I should just…” He trailed off as his throat tightened uncomfortably, not wanting to cry in front of a stranger.

“...do nothing?” Takashi finished for him.

Lance nodded, gripping his knees tight. Yeah. That was it. That was the feeling, condensed into two words, an all-powerful absolute. _Do nothing._

“Can I tell you a story?” Takashi asked, his tone light. Lance didn’t know what else to do except sit there silently and let the stranger take that as a yes. “About ten years ago now, I joined the army.”

Lance glanced up in surprise—was he about to hear the story behind the arm and the scar? Takashi was staring out to sea, his eyes far away, glazed over.

“It was stupid,” he laughed ruefully. “I had a fiancé here, and a kid I was sort of trying to adopt, too. I felt like I had something to prove, though. I felt this insatiable need to validate my existence, like I had to pay for my time here somehow. I thought I’d stop feeling so restless and guilty all the time if I just put my time in, serving others. So, I joined the army.”

“Did you save a bunch of civilians Captain America style?” Lance joked, because making jokes of dark situations was his specialty. Luckily, Takashi laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “Definitely not. But, I did manage to save one person though, and in the end, I think that was enough.”

Lance raised an eyebrow, leaning forward, hopelessly invested. “Really? Who?”

And Takashi just smiled at him with a look on his face that was full of wisdom. “Myself,” he said, and raised his prosthetic arm. “This? This almost killed me. But I decided I was gonna make it, and so I did.” He lowered his arm again, inclining his head toward Lance. “Nobody can do everything, Lance. But it doesn’t make the actions we do take any less meaningful. Even if in your whole life you only manage to save one fish, it’s still worth it. It’s always worth it.”

“Jeez,” Lance joked weakly, totally taken aback by the purity of the sentiment, “who died and made you Aristotle?” He rubbed at his misty eyes with his palm as the sound of flip flops slapping on the pavement caught his attention; some other pedestrian approaching.

“Oh shit! Lance!” Lance wheeled around to see that the flip flop runner was actually Beni, running back toward the house from the beach. “I was just coming to get you!” he panted.

Lance’s stomach jolted and he lurched to his feet, immediately assuming the worst. “What’s wrong? Where’s Gabi?”

“She’s fine,” he panted, hands on his knees. “There’s a seal though. It’s hurt, I think? I told Alex and Mariah not to touch it but they’re kinda stupid so we should hurry—”

“Say no more,” Lance said, and promptly began to follow Beni back toward the beach stairs. To his surprise, Takashi got up and followed as well.

“What?” he said. “Seals are heavy. I can help.”

“Alright, come on then, big guy,” Lance said, and together the three of them booked it toward the beach.

Right away Lance could tell there was something wrong, even from atop the cliffside as they first stepped onto the pocked wooden stairwell that switchbacked down to the narrow strip of sand between the rocks and the waves. There was a big brown seal that had washed up, and there was a group of four kids crowding around it, although the smallest one (Gabi, he would bet money on that) kept pushing the others away, forcing them to give the seal space. He could hear its distressed barking from up here, and that put the hustle in his step, bringing him to the head of their trio, passing Beni on the stairs. Only when they got to the sand and began to approach did Lance realize why the seal sounded so distressed.

It was tangled in some kind of broken fishing net, torn in places and rotting in others, but just connected enough to have wrapped in a hopeless tangle around the seal's midsection and tail, limiting his movement to painful wriggles. Gabi and Beni’s two friends fell to hushed whispers as Lance and the others arrived, falling back and watching to see what Lance would do.

“You guys didn’t touch him, did you?” Lance asked, assessing the little cuts where the net was digging in the worst. “He’s in pain and distressed, so he’ll lash out and bite you if you take him by surprise.”

“No, we were waiting for you,” Gabi said, and Mariah nodded, her frizzy hair bobbing wildly.

“Gabi said you’re a fish whisperer,” she said, and Gabi elbowed her in the ribs.

“I am,” Lance laughed, and as soon as Lance crouched in front of the harbor seal, it quieted its barking immediately, locking eyes with Lance. “Oh my god,” Lance breathed. _“Dipper?”_

Dipper barked; less in distress this time and more in recognition. There was no doubt about it. Lance knew that softer, friendly bark. Dipper usually saved it for Keith, though. He hadn’t heard it in years.

Sighing, Lance settled in by the seal, reaching out to test the waters and sighing in relief when Dipper allowed him to touch his nose without snapping or panicking. “Hey buddy,” he mumbled. “Long time, no see. You really got yourself into a mess this time, huh.” He wondered if Dipper had ended up here by trying to make it back to the grotto, hoping Keith would help him out.

“Aaand he knows the seal,” Gabi sighed. “Of course he knows the seal.”

Lance wasn’t listening. “I think he’s alright,” he told the others. “His cuts aren’t that bad, we just have to get this net off.”

“Should I go home for scissors?” Beni wondered.

“Nah,” Lance said. “I got something.” Reaching into his pocket, he fished out the pocket knife Keith had carved for him so long ago. Although he’d been carrying it for years, now that he flicked it open and gazed at it again, it dawned on him that he’d never actually _used_ it for anything before. The words Keith had etched on the side jumped out at him.

 

_you’ll know when to use me_

 

After running his thumb over the words in a small moment of reverence as he processed the cosmic irony, Lance motioned for Takashi to help hold Dipper in place so he didn’t get nicked. Then he gave the seal a reassuring pat the head and slipped the knife under the thickest patch of netting behind his right flipper and started to cut. It took a solid ten minutes of sawing at various points in the tangled mess of net, but finally something structural gave way. Dipper must have known it before Lance did because he let out a triumphant bark and started to wiggle frantically, bucking Takashi clean off and onto his back in the sand and forcing Lance to lurch backward lest he accidentally cut himself or Dipper on the knife.

Before he’d even righted himself, Dipper was already shirking off the remainder of the netting. Gabi and Alex helpfully jumped in to pull the last ratty pieces off his tail. Lance had to toss his knife aside as Dipper turned in a graceless roll and launched himself at him. The gesture surprised him and knocked him over, knocking the breath clean out of his lungs as well. The four kids gasped in concern, but Lance waved them off. “It’s fine,” he laughed, “it’s fine. Dipper, come on, man, I can’t breathe.”

As if he could understand, Dipper acquiesced and rolled off. He blew a short raspberry at Takashi, who burst into surprised laughter as the seal took his leave of the beach and embarked on a happy waddle back toward the water.

“I cannot believe that just happened,” Gabi’s friend was saying. “You _are_ a fish whisperer!”

“I told you,” Gabi preened.

"I just care a lot, that's all," Lance explained, noting that the two high schoolers seemed to be hanging on his next words. Even Gabi and Beni seemed more attentive than usual. "That seal grew up here," he explained. "This harbor is like his house and we just.. threw our garbage in it." Furrowing his eyebrows at the net in the sand, he nudged it with his foot. "Stray nets like this make up something like forty-six percent of all ocean-polluting plastics, did you know that?"

"No," Alex responded blankly, and Mariah quickly started shoving him to help her pick up the net from the sand.

Beni shook his head in wonder as their two friends coordinated to pick up the net pieces, then turned to look at Dipper, who was now splashing into the water. “I _really_ don’t get why you’re quitting the SLRC, Lance. Don’t they need you?”

A long, drawn-out noise of pure exasperation erupted from Gabi. “Does this _look_ like the SLRC to you?" she asked Beni, gesturing at the beach. "Is he _wearing_ his uniform right now? Maybe they need him, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need them. _Just_ saying.”

Lance rolled his eyes fondly, rising to his feet and dusting as much sand off as he could. It was always a losing battle though. He nodded at Takashi where he was standing in wait (and looking at him like some kind of fond dad), indicating it was their time to depart and leave the kids in peace to enjoy their evening.

As they walked back to the stairs together, Lance realized this was the first time he’d been down to this beach in ages. It was nice. It was nice to be back here again. Didn't hurt so much, today.

"What are you smiling about," Lance asked his new friend, nudging him with his elbow as they started the upward climb back toward Cliff Drive.

"Nothing," he said. "You, I guess. I don't know. You kinda reminded me of someone I knew once, back there. He had this weak spot for seals… Always giving them names..."

“Oh," Lance said, and then, because the stranger had grown wistful and distant and Lance sensed this interaction drawing to a natural close, he decided to say, "Thanks for your help, by the way," and reached out to shake his hand. “Takashi, right?”

The man faltered as he took Lance's offered hand, caught off guard somehow. “Oh. Yeah,” he agreed, “but you can call me Shiro, though. Everyone does.”

Lance froze mid-shake as the weight of that word skated into his brain like a braking train _._ Piercing him _. Oh my god_.

_Oh my god??_

“Shiro,” he breathed. “You’re Shiro?”

Shiro blinked at him, awkwardly releasing Lance's frozen hand. “Yeah. Have we met..?”

“You were talking about _Keith._ That kid you wanted to adopt! You were talking about Keith!”

“I— yes,” Shiro breathed, “ _yeah_. You've met him?" He slapped his hands to his temples, taking a stumbling step back and bouncing off the stair rail. "You know Keith?!”

“Know him!” Lance cackled, throwing his head back and letting the ocean wind whip his hair away from his face as he let a full-bellied laugh erupt out of him. “ _Boy_ do I know him!”

“I don't know what that means,” Shiro laughed back frantically. “Is he okay? Can I see him? I can't _imagine_ what he's been through over the years. I tried so hard to find him again, but I couldn't find a job on a fishing line again after I got discharged because of my arm. And the ocean’s so damn _big_.”

“Sure is,” Lance sighed, his laughter petering out into fond awe. “I'm sorry. He was always talking about you, you know, and hoping you’d come back someday. You really meant a lot to him. I... I tried to find you. Never knew ‘Shiro’ was short for something, though. Damn.”

“It's okay,” Shiro pleaded, “just—just tell me Keith's okay. I've run this same path for years, always afraid I'd find him washed up somewhere below. He was so alone.”

“He wasn't, though,” Lance shook his head in disagreement. “He wasn’t alone at all.”

And as the sun sank slowly toward the horizon, the two of them walked together along Cliff Drive, and Lance told Shiro all about what it was like growing up with Keith.

It was dark by the time Lance his goodbyes to his new friend, having exchanged phone numbers, of course, and having received express permission to call or text him and Mr. Sabbagh _(he’s gonna prefer Adam now,_ Shiro insisted, _Mr. Sabbagh makes him feel old)_ at any time. When he finally made it back to his own childhood home, Laura was sitting out on one of the two chairs on the front patio, waiting patiently for him to return.

“I heard you saved a seal,” she said nonchalantly as he leaned on the column holding up the patio. “The gremlins have been talking about it for like, an hour and a half.”

Lance laughed, leaning his head tiredly against the column too. “Yeah. I’ve had a hell of a day, to be honest.”

“Good or bad?”

“Good,” Lance said without even thinking. “Definitely good. Um.. so, I invited Marco over,” he threw out, even though Laura undoubtedly knew this already since Marco’s car was already parked on the street outside. He must have gotten here while Lance was still out walking with Shiro. “I thought about what you said, and I realized I’ve been kinda distant from the family lately.”

“Oh, you think?”

“Shut up,” Lance laughed at her over-dramatic response, rolling his head over to look at her and seeing that her mahogany eyes were sparkling in the yellow porch light. She was joking with him, which was a good sign. “I’m… I’m trying to be better,” he said, “and I haven’t been going about any of this the right way.” He put on his best gruff impression of their father and gesticulated, saying, _“We always open important letters as a family, Leandro.”_

“Yeah. We do,” Laura said, smiling through her hand where she was leaning on it. “Let’s go, then.”

When everyone had gathered in the living room, Lance was reminded distantly of the other times they’d gathered like this, one person standing in the middle between the coffee table and TV, whoever it was that had an announcement to make. Whether it was Mamá telling everyone that she broke the PlayStation on accident while vacuuming and she was so so sorry, or Marco telling everyone he was moving in with Jessica, or Lance telling everyone his best friend lived in the ocean. This was no different, really. There was something comforting in the whole family sitting together like this, patiently waiting to hear whatever it was that Lance had to say. The knowledge that nothing he ever said could affect the metaphysical strings connecting them all, binding them together.

“So.. I’m quitting the SLRC,” he said, simply. “I don’t think I’m being utilized effectively there, considering my unconventional background and unique skills, and I’m just not sure it’s what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

“That’s fair,” Marco said from the recliner. “What are you going to do now, then?”

“Probably something crazy,” Lance said honestly, “because I never learn.”

Gabi snorted. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, thinking about Dipper. Thinking about Keith. Thinking about that thing Shiro said about saving one fish, and how it still mattered. “I think I’m going to go solo,” he explained. “Save up for my own boat, do my own thing, freestyle. I think I’m ready for that.”

Papá nodded slowly as the family soaked this info in, once, then again with more purpose, then he reached into his pocket and pulled something out. His… his keys? Lance watched him with building curiosity as he carefully wriggled once of the smaller keyrings off of it and then tossed it on the coffee table in Lance’s general direction with a loud clatter. In a daze, Lance stared at the key being offered to him. He knew what key this was. He’d only begged for it a _thousand_ times over the years, only to be met with answers like _‘you’re not old enough’_ or _‘only with supervision’_ or _‘maybe someday.’_ Reaching down for it slowly, he met eyes wildly with Papá, then glanced to Mamá, who seemed to be accepting this abrupt decision it total stride.

When no one said anything, Lance picked up the key.

“Seriously?” he breathed. “ _Why?_ ”

“Why do you think?” Laura said. “Because they believe in you, Lance. We all do.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “What is it that you believe in, exactly?”

Mamá cut in gently. “As much as you repeat the words _‘I don’t know’_ at us, we know you have a plan hatching in that head of yours. So as far as I’m concerned, she’s yours now. Put her to good use, Leandro.”

“What are you gonna do with the boat?” Gabi asked excitedly.

A million conflicting answers bubbled about in his head as Lance gazed at the boat key as it dangled from its ring on his pointer finger, slowly turning in a half circle like a goldfish coming around toward the front of the tank for another look, rolling back around so that the little laminated tag was facing Lance. _Old Blue,_ it said. He’d have to give her a new name. A new name for a new beginning. Because that’s what this was, he was pretty sure. A new beginning. He didn’t know what kind of beginning, yet, but he could already feel it blossoming up from the bottom of his heart, up up up until he couldn’t contain it anymore.

“It’s kind of a crazy idea,” he confessed softly.

“Wait wait wait!” Laura declared, and as Lance closed his hands tight around the key, she got up and sprinted into the kitchen for a notebook, returning at a slide to sit at the edge of the coffee table. Freshly seated, she flipped to a blank page in the notebook and clicked her pen. “Okay, I’m ready. Lay it on me.”

Admitting that he _did_ have an idea ready to go, and that this was something he had thought about before (late, late at night when wishful thinking was allowed) was cathartic, as was the acknowledgment that for his whole life he’d been looking at his future in terms of what he thought he should do, versus what he wanted. Now, a part of him that hadn’t seen sunlight since the distant-most summertime of his childhood was finally unfolding its leaves and turning back toward the sun, like it was the most natural thing in the world to have been away, and as natural to return again. Another lap around the sun. Another season gone by. Another go.

“Okay,” he said, “so here’s what I want to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t possibly convey how personal this story is for me and how long and hard I've thought on the themes and character arcs and how cathartic this has been for me to write. Anyway, we’re nearing the end here (two chapters left to go!) and I’m so fucking excited for the next one, AHHH. In addition, I want to extend my love to anyone who identifies with this chapter and remind you that you are NEVER ALONE and that it always gets better, and that sometimes, the person in the best position to pull you up by the bootstraps and out of the funk you're in is yourself. Keep on keepin’ on, everyone.
> 
> If you guess at the plot I won't answer just because anything I say will be spoilers but pls know that I DO read every single comment and treasure each one, even though I can be bad sometimes about knowing what to say in response. I always read comments and they are the fuel that keeps me writin. Love you all and thanks for being the best. I went through pretty much the same character arc I wrote for Lance here this year and it feels good to be on the other side of a bad depressive dip, so again, I really want to reiterate to anyone who identifies with this chapter that it WILL GET BETTER. IT WILL GET BETTER EVEN IF YOU FEEL LIKE THERE'S NO WAY IT EVER COULD, because EVERYTHING in the universe is cyclical, absolutely everything. The thing is, the shift between winter and spring can only come from within, it can't come from without. The sun doesn't change the seasons, the Earth does that on its own as it travels its orbit. I chose the hardest way to learn this, but I'm glad I'm finally getting there, and I hope that in some small way this story I've written speaks to this.
> 
> Thanks for listening and reading, see you in the next chapter <3
> 
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